


The Harpy

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Greek Mythology AU, Harpy!Caitlin, also this is not the story for you if you like Hartley or Thawne, mosylu plays fast and loose with mythology, mythological creature death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-07 01:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13423404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: On Saturday, Thawne Labs caught a harpy.For junior researcher/night watchman/glorified zookeeper Cisco Ramon, it's going to be one hell of a week.





	1. The First Night

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of the weirder AUs I've ever done, and I love weird AUs. Hope you like it anyway.

On Saturday, Thawne Labs caught a harpy.

Cisco learned about it when he came in to work at eight that night. It was an okay job, mostly. On paper, he was listed as the lab's junior research fellow, and his job was to take notes and observe the creatures overnight, and of course to troll through regular and social media for any hints of wild creatures out there.

But in reality, he was a glorified zookeeper, and a bored one at that. He pretty much just had to make sure none of the creatures got loose overnight. Since very few of them were nocturnal, that wasn't much of a strain. It gave him a lot of time to tinker with his inventions, at least.

Technically speaking he also had to make sure none of them died, but he hadn't done so well with that.

"A what?" he said when Hartley told him what they'd bagged this time.

"A winged demon that destroys and befouls everything it touches, sound familiar?"

"Yeah, but the breach has been closed for three years." It had only been open for about five days, as creatures straight of out mythology poured through, to get firebombed by the army (in the case of the big ones, the centaurs and the satyrs and the chimeras) or captured and locked up by Thawne Labs (the little things like dryads). They'd been scrambling to catch creatures in the beginning, but now they were lucky if they got a random report and could go out with a butterfly net once a month. "How'd we all miss something that big for that long?"

Hartley's eyes flickered away. "I don't know. Maybe the army had it."

"General Eiling's policy is to kill on sight."

"That's what they tell us. Who really knows?"

Cisco eyed him. He had the feeling he wasn't getting the whole truth. Thursday and Friday nights, Thawne had been totally MIA, and Hartley had been so distracted he'd barely managed to insult Cisco. They'd been hunting her, he thought. Why was this the first he'd heard of it?

"So, where did you put her?"

"The downtown Marriott, what do you think?" Hartley sneered. "In the pipeline, of course."

He pulled up the feed to the big cells, the ones down in the pipeline. They'd only been used a few times, for big creatures that they'd managed to catch. The cells were all empty now. Well, all except one.

The harpy was huddled in the corner of the cell. A mop of tangled white hair hid half her face. A pair of ice-white wings wrapped over her body, exposing the long line of her spine all the way down her back.

She was fully human size, and her _wings_ -

"Isn't that cell kind of small for her?" Cisco said, staring at those massive wings. "Wait - the harpy is a lady, right?" He'd never heard of a guy harpy, but brave new world and all that.

"It's female, yes, and it's fine where it is."

"Fine? Are you kidding me? She probably can't even open her wings all the way."

"You seriously want a harpy to spread its wings?" Hartley said. "Don't be more of an idiot than you have to be."

"It just sounds uncomfortable for her."

"It's a monster, Ramon. Don't go ascribing human feelings to it."

"Wanting to be comfortable isn't specific to humanity," Cisco shot back. "And look what happened to the chimera and the griffin when you shut them in there."

"Those monsters were dying anyway."

"You don't know that."

"Besides, that thing would rip all our throats out," Hartley said.

"Well, sure, if you cram anyone in a tin can, they'll wanna rip your throat out."

"Would you like to give it a blanky and a teddy bear, too?"

Cisco ignored him and went to check on the dryads. After all his time at this lab, he knew when the conversation had just devolved to insults.

Contrary to everything the internet said about sexy naked tree ladies, dryads were sparrow-sized creatures with no gender characteristics they'd been able to figure out, shy to the point of invisibility. At Thawne Labs, they lived in the open courtyard in the center of the building. Before the explosion, Cisco was told, it had been a coveted lunch spot in nice weather, and he could see why. In daylight it would have been pretty nice under the shade of the trees, listening to the trickle of the fountain.

The picnic tables were still there, but the fountain had run dry and the landscaping had been totally neglected, the trees and bushes running wild. They'd enclosed a section of it with chicken wire for the dryads. It was better than the cages where they had first lived, inside the lab.

The entrance to the enclosure was set up with a sort of airlock, where you had to open one door, latch it behind you, and then open the second door to get into the enclosure. It was to cut down on escapes. Although Cisco had never had a dryad make a break for it, Thawne had insisted on adding that to his design.

"Hey, guys," he said, bumping the latch on the second door open with his elbow and bumping it closed him with his hip. He carried a gallon jug of sugar water in each hand. "Guess what I brought? Your favorite."

A few rustles and the glint of eyes here and there betrayed the presence of some dryads, but otherwise he might as well be alone. Used to it, Cisco walked around and refilled the feeders with the sugar water they drank in gallons. Then he checked the tablet mounted on the cage that showed a readout of all the dryad's vital signs, beamed to it wirelessly from a tiny implant in each creature's delicate neck. Most of them were doing okay, good heartbeats, good temperature, but one -

"Aw, no, come on," he murmured, tapping the line for D-24. "Twenty-four, pull it together." But as he watched, the levels dropped lower.

His heart sinking, he wove his way through the enclosure, checking each tree. He sighed when he spotted the body at the base of a tree. He squatted. "Hey, little dude," he murmured, reaching out to touch the dryad's curled back.

That it let him touch it at all confirmed what he already knew from the tablet's readout - it was dying. In fact, as his finger brushed its back, it twitched feebly and then lay still. Behind him, an alarm went off on the tablet.

He sighed again and looked up. Although he couldn't see any of the still-living dryads, he could almost feel their eyes on him. Frustration bubbled in his stomach. He brought them as much sugar water as they could eat. He'd rigged up heaters so they wouldn't get too cold out here in the winter. He made sure the trees were okay, with his limited knowledge of tree-stuff. "Guys," he said. "I don't know what else to do for you. I'm sorry."

He knew what it was; they were far from home, far from the sunlight and trees and air of their own dimension. They were going to keep dying until they were all gone.

He slipped his hand under the dryad's cooling body. It felt like a feather in his palm. He already knew what the tablet would say, but he looked anyway, holding the sad little weight against his body. All its levels were flat. It was dead.

He looked around. "I'm sorry," he said again.

He let himself out of their cage and took the dead dryad inside, to the crematorium.

* * *

When he returned to the cortex, Hartley was packing up to go. "About time you got back," he said.

"D-24 died," Cisco said.

"Another one? Put it in the database." He walked across the room and pulled open the fridge to reveal two metal buckets, and several slabs of what looked like partial cows defrosting. "And then do this."

"Thanks, I'm getting Big Belly Burger tonight."

"It's not for you, it's for the harpy," Hartley said. “It’ll need to be fed at least twice. That’s your job.” With a smirk, Hartley pointed into one of the buckets. “Din-din.”

Cisco leaned over and peered in. The only way you could really describe the harpy's meal was by using the word _gobbets._

He swallowed. "What, no birdseed?"

"Does that look like a blue jay to you?" said a new voice.

They both turned to see Thawne striding into the lab. “Mr. Ramon,” he said. “I see you’re hearing about our new acquisition. Exciting, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” Cisco said. “Thrilling. Raw meat, really?”

“Naturally.” Thawne turned to the screen, and Cisco had to look away from his face.

He remembered Thawne showing him the chimera when they'd first caught it, wounded and weak in the pipeline cell. The lab director's face had been full of pride and excitement, while Cisco had just wanted to unlock the cell and clean the blood off the poor creature's matted fur.

Thawne wore the same look now.

"She's a bird of prey, you know," Thawne said. "Like a hawk or a falcon."

“How do you know she won’t decide to prey on me?”

“Mr. Rathaway’s still got all his fingers,” Thawne said, and Hartley's face went sour.

Thawne continued, “Feed her every six hours. Once at ten, once at four. Hartley here will do a feeding when he comes in the morning.”

“Right,” Cisco said, hoping Hartley wasn't late.

* * *

At ten o’clock that night, he retrieved the first chilly, heavy, sloshy bucket from the refrigerator and made his way down to the pipeline. Maybe she would be tucked up for the night, her head folded under her wing. He glanced at the readout with her designation, H-1, at the top, and her vital signs lined up below it. Healthy, strong, energetic. 

She was still huddled in the corner where the cameras had shown her, but she wasn't asleep. When he stepped up to the door, she looked up, and then launched herself out of the corner, slamming into the glass with a thud that rattled it from top to bottom.

He jumped back with a yelp, the bucket of bloody meat clanging to the floor. Jumping backward on a ramp wasn't the best idea, because he landed, wobbled, and collapsed splat on his ass, staring transfixed up at the harpy.

She stared back.

Her eyes were big and dark, as if they'd sucked all the color out of her skin and her hair and her wings. He'd wondered if they would be bird eyes, with the slit pupil, but they were disconcertingly human. Or maybe he was freaked out because they were so unerringly fixed on him.

Maybe he looked like dinner.

He glanced down and realized that the bucket hadn't tipped over when he dropped it, by some miracle. Phew. He hadn’t been looking forward to cleaning that up.

A noise like fingernails across a chalkboard, except worse, brought his head up. Her fingers, with their long, sharp, talon-like nails, curled and flexed against the glass. He swallowed, looking at them, and trying not to stare at her naked body, revealed by her partially spread wings.

(She was definitely a lady harpy.)

She was still staring at him.

The cell was definitely too small, he noted. The tips of her wings were crammed against the walls on either side and the highest peak of the wing - the alula, his brain supplied from the weird brainplace where random facts hid away until they could leap out and startle you - bumped the ceiling. Did birds bruise? She must be all bruise under those feathers.

But she was standing and moving and didn't look obviously wounded. Not like the chimera. Definitely not like the griffin. So maybe she'd make it longer than they had.

“Hey,” he said cautiously, edging forward to retrieve the bucket, and then climbing slowly to his feet. “Hi there. I got your bedtime snack here.” He felt dumb immediately. Did she even understand? But all the creatures responded to the sound of his voice, calming and settling. He figured it was a change from Hartley or Thawne, anyway.

“Hey,” he said again, because she still hadn’t looked away, and she hadn’t blinked, and he was starting to seriously wonder if she could smash the glass, lash out with her claws, and disembowel him. Maybe warm live meat was better than cold and dead. That would be his preference anyway.

If he were a harpy.

“You hungry?” he said gently, and tilted the bucket so she could see the contents.

She looked at it, and her lips parted. Her teeth were sharp and pointed.

Off to one side of the door was the feeding system that he’d built for when they might have a dangerous creature in here. It was a one way hatch that spilled out into a trough fastened to the wall inside the cell. He’d thought it was pretty neat when he came up with it, and it had worked okay for the chimera and the griffin, but now it seemed cold and dehumanizing.

(Was that the right word when she wasn't even human?)

Still, she had to be fed. He unlatched the covering, and tipped the bucket up, pouring the chunks of meat and their broth of blood into the hatch. It spilled into the trough, sliding down the slight slope until it piled up against the end.

She turned her head to look at it. On a human woman, her face would have been distinctly unenthusiastic.

“It’s cold, I know. Sorry about that. Maybe I’ll try microwaving it next time.” The griffin had eaten better when the meat was warm, before it stopped eating at all.

She turned away. Her wings bumped the top of the cell, and her wingtip feathers brushed the door. She went back to her corner and folded herself down again.

“Not hungry?” he ventured. “Or are you maybe a vegetarian harpy?”

The arch of her wings quivered, as if her shoulders were shaking beneath them.

He stood awkwardly for a minute or two, wishing she would stop - crying? Did harpies cry? If they did, nobody had more cause to cry than this one.

"You should eat," he said to her trembling wings. "Keep up your strength."

She didn't respond.

He went back upstairs and washed out the bucket before settling down to work on a device he’d been tinkering with.

He told himself, _Don't get attached, you know what happened with the others. They just don't thrive here. It's not where they belong. Don't get attached._

But it was hard not to, when you looked in their eyes.

He kept an eye on the monitors, and she did eventually eat the meat he’d brought.  Even though she tore through it like the carnivore she was, he was relieved. A body that size - with those _wings -_ needed to be fueled.

He warmed her second meal of the night in the microwave, which was super fun, transferring that much raw meat to a microwave safe bowl in batches, and then how to heat it slowly, warming it without cooking it. And the smell infected the entire cortex.

But it was worth it when he went downstairs, and her head turned toward the warmed meat in the trough right away. She ate several chunks as he stood there, focused on the food and not him.

Although to tell the truth, she almost looked like she didn't _want_ to look at him. Like she was avoiding him.

He felt weirdly insulted by that.

* * *

Hartley arrived on time, for once, just as Cisco was starting to think he'd need to cut up some of that beef for her breakfast. “Ramon! It didn’t eat you.”

“Nope." Cisco hopped up, stretching. "She’s fine, by the way. I still say she needs more room. And she eats better when the food is warm. Remember, the griffin did the same thing? Look, I took notes - "

Hartley snorted. "You pamper it on your own time, Ramon. Some of us actually want to do research."

"This is research, asshole," Cisco said, but Hartley ignored him.


	2. The Second Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out this chapter is ready! :D I may actually be able to post twice a week after all. Heh. Don't hold me to that.

In his apartment with all the windows tightly covered so as not to let daylight in, Cisco dreamed.

_ "You ever think that if these are real - dryads, harpies, chimeras - then everything about the stories is real too?" _

_ Hartley snorted. "They're monsters from another dimension. Only an idiot child would think that means gods are real, too." _

_ "You were the one who said gods," Cisco pointed out. "Not me." _

He woke and blinked at his clock, which told him it was four in the afternoon. He sighed, yawned, and scratched his belly, wondering when he'd had that conversation. It sounded like something he'd say, and something that Hartley would say, but - 

Whatever.

He rolled over again and went back to sleep. This time, it was an old familiar one - walking around the perimeter of a curving wall. He ran his fingers along the stones, which fit together perfectly, like puzzle pieces. He looked up every so often. The top of the wall disappeared into the clouds.

The wall kept going, around and around, and so did he.

When he woke up again at seven-thirty that night, he'd forgotten both dreams.

* * *

When he walked in, yawning over his evening coffee, he saw the harpy in the med lab. She was spread out on a gurney in the lab, unmoving, eyes closed. Her wings drooped to the floor and her hand dangled off the side. 

Cisco's stomach lurched. "She died?" Already? He hadn't even been here.

"She's tranquilized, idiot," Hartley said, and Cisco felt his stomach unknot. You'd think after having two giant creatures die basically in your lap, and finding dying dryads a few times a week, it would be a relief to not be there for it.

Funny thing, it wasn't.

"We also needed to take measurements and draw blood," Thawne added. "It took us half the day to come up with a tranq that would take. She should be out for several hours still. We have an IV drip going. You won’t have to feed her.”

“Why don’t you put her back in her cell while she’s out?”

“Through that cell was too small for your pet, Ramon,” Hartley said. 

“It’s better than a cold gurney all night long.”

“It’ll be fine. We have more tests to run in the morning. Easier to leave it here.”

"Wait! What do I do if she wakes up?"

Hartley snickered. "Run."

Thawne gave him a quelling look. “We're restraining her for the night,” he told Cisco, indicating the straps on the gurney that he hadn’t noticed before. He buckled them around her as he spoke, cinching each one tight. One around each ankle and wrist, and then a long strap around her waist, one over her forehead, and one for each of her wings, at the base. "And the IV is set to inject her again if needed. You should be perfectly fine, Mr. Ramon."

"If you say so."

After they left, he browsed Wikipedia for harpy stories and tried not to think of the live harpy in the other room.

The way they’d laid her out disturbed him intensely. It was so clinical, her naked body spread out and tied down, exposed like a cadaver to the cool air of the med lab. He finally got a thick blanket out and spread it over her, chin to toes, and he could swear that her sleeping face relaxed when he did. 

Half an hour later, a rustle of feathers brought his head up. He swallowed and moved toward the door of the med lab. “Hi,” he said from a safe distance.

She blinked slowly, groggily, but her eyes moved to track him. Her wings fluttered and rustled as if she were trying to fold them up, but couldn’t. 

She looked so confused and helpless that he edged forward. “Sorry about the - “ he indicated her imprisonment. 

Her wings fluttered again. The tips of a few long feathers caught the hem of the blanket, tugging it partially off her body. She looked down at it, her brows pulling together.

“You want that back? It’s freezing in here, isn’t it? Here.” He tugged the blanket back over her and tucked it under her body, in innocuous places like under her knees and her upper arms. “Better?”

She considered him. Her eyes were less fuzzy now.

He looked back at her. The skin around her forehead strap looked puffy and swollen. God, they’d really lashed her down, hadn’t they? He reached out for the strap where it fastened to the table, on her left side. “I’m going to loosen this, okay?”

He moved carefully, trying not to let his hand get too close to her mouth and her wicked teeth, but he loosened it just a little. She let out a sigh. The skin underneath the strap looked red. 

“This sucks,” he said softly. “I’m really sorry.”

She blinked a few times, and then opened her mouth wide and sucked in her breath.

His lungs seemed to fill with ice, as if she were drinking the air from them. His head spun and his chest felt like there was an elephant sitting on it.

He stumbled backward, gasping for air. When his vision had cleared, he coughed out, “What was that?” He wheezed and coughed again. “What did you do?”

She’d relaxed into the gurney again and was watching him, mouth fastened closed. 

“What was that?” he demanded, as if she could answer.

Something clicked, and suddenly pale blue flooded her IV line. The tranq. Even as he watched, still panting for breath, her eyes went cloudy and fluttered closed again.

He turned on his heel and left her alone for the rest of the night. 

* * *

When Hartley came in the next morning, he rolled his eyes at the blanket over the harpy's body. He opened his mouth, and Cisco said, "I don't even want to hear it."

Hartley sneered him. “Did it do anything weird? Did it wake up?”

His lungs ached with remembered cold. “Nope,” Cisco said, and slung his bag over his shoulder. "See you tonight."

"Hmmmm," Hartley mumbled to himself as Cisco walked out, thinking about what she'd done, and why he was reluctant to say anything to Hartley.

First off, what  _ had _ she done? 

He’d never heard of harpies sucking people's breath out of their bodies. Or was that even what she'd been done? She'd stopped, after all, and he'd been fine in another minute.

Maybe it had been a threat.  _ This is what I can do. _

But he remembered the expression on her face, thoughtful, and the way she kept her lips sealed as if holding his air in her mouth, and as strange as it seemed, he didn't feel threatened.

Maybe he should.

He was thinking about it so hard that Thawne had to call his name twice in the parking lot. he looked up, blinking. The director usually wasn't in this early. 

"Cisco," Thawne said. "I'm glad I caught you."

"Hey. Hi. What's up?"

"I wanted to check in. See how you're doing. We so rarely get to talk, with our schedules the way they are."

"Well, yeah, no. I guess not."

"So. how are you?"

He looked away. "Okay, I guess. Yeah."

"Really? Nothing keeping you up at night? Are you dreaming again?"

He'd had a lot of dreams right after the breach had happened. At the time, Thawne had said it was his brain trying to work itself out. Cisco guessed his brain had given up. 

He shrugged, looking down at his arm, touching a new mole that he'd just noticed today. A tiny dark dot right on the bone of his wrist. "Not really. Nothing new, anyway."

"The wall?"

He nodded.

Thawne put his hand on Cisco's shoulder. "Things will start to come back eventually."

"It's been three years," Cisco said. "You'd think they'd've done it if they were gonna. "

"Brains are funny things, and that was a highly unusual experience."

"Yeah, how often does a hole to another dimension rip open over Central City?"

Thawne's eyes flickered for a split second, and then he smiled. "Let's hope not very often. It seems to create all manner of havoc."

"Ha. Yeah."

"How did our harpy do overnight? Anything strange there?"

Cisco opened his mouth, then shut it. "Nope," he said. "She was out the whole night."

Thawne looked at him for a moment. Cisco wondered if he could see the lie. "Well," he said softly. "Good to know."

He swallowed back the guilt. "I think she needs a bigger cell. That one's too small even for her to spread her wings. She can't be comfortable."

"Very likely," Thawne acknowledged, "but they're what we have to work with, and we don't have unlimited funding."

"I know, but it seems like we should be able to do something."

"Tell you what, Ramon. Why don't you give it some thought and bring me your ideas?"

"Wha - me? Uh, sure, I guess."

"Good. Good." Thawne clapped him on the shoulder. "Go home, son. Get some sleep." He let go and headed for the lab's front door, and Cisco headed off in the other direction, toward the squat building at the edge of the parking lot. 

But he lay awake for most of the morning, thinking about the harpy's icy breath, about lying to Hartley and then to Thawne, and what it all meant.

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of the wall again. He stood at its base, his head tipped all the way back. He couldn't see the top. 

A cold wind whipped around the stone curve, tossing his hair all around his head. He turned his face into it and breathed deep. 


	3. The Third Night

She was back in the pipeline cell the next night. Cisco didn't know whether he was relieved or annoyed by that. It was still fucking _tiny_. He pointed that out to Hartley, who snorted and said, "I heard you the first seventeen times."

"If you don't make some kind of accommodation for her size, especially those wings, you're going to lose her just like you lost the other two giant creatures."

"I keep telling you they were dying already."

"And I keep telling you, that tiny cell didn't help!"

"You do something, then," Hartley said, and left.

After he checked on the dryads - no little bodies tonight, fortunately - he sat drawing designs for a larger, improved cell. One without a trough. Maybe if he welded two or three of the cells together? Cut walls out? It would be enough room for her to move around, but it still didn't solve the problem of the wings. She needed to be able to spread them, to flex them - to _fly._

His alarm went off, reminding him to warm up her meal. He put his pencil down and just looked at the fridge for a moment, trying to work out if the flutter in his belly was fear or what.

Whatever she'd done, it had been weird. But she would be behind glass again, locked in. And it wasn't like he could just let her go hungry.

He warmed her food and took the bucket downstairs at the usual time, telling himself that the glass was _very_ thick and Hartley hadn't gotten disemboweled or freeze-breathed yet.

Too bad.

When he hit the base of the ramp, she looked up as if she'd been waiting for him. His feet stuttered, but he made himself keep going. He had food, after all. She was probably hungry.

As he walked right up to the glass, she came up to it too, pressing her hands flat against it. Her mouth moved, and he jittered back a step before he realized she wasn't sucking in her breath. Or even licking her lips or making screechy bird noises like he would have guessed.

She looked like -

No way.

She looked like she was _talking._

The glass muffled sound, but they had a mike set up in there to catch vocalizations. He hit the button, wondering if it even worked.

A harsh, croaking voice echoed over the speakers. "I seek the son of Maia. The keeper of the flocks, the - "

He dropped the bucket. "Oh my god! You can talk! You're speaking English!"

She paused, blinking at him. "I seek the son of Maia," she said.

"What did you do to me last night? What was that?"

"The - the keeper of the flocks," she said.

They stared at each other through the glass. Her eyes looked desperate.

Or was he just anthropomorphizing a monster, like Hartley said? She was talking - but maybe she was like a parrot, that could repeat a phrase without knowing what it meant.

Or maybe Hartley was a dumbass and Cisco was an even bigger dumbass for listening to him.

"Can you say that again?" he said gently. "You seek the son of - ?"

Her eyes lit. "I seek the son of Maia, the - "

"Who's Maia?"

The light died out of her face.

"What's her son's name?" he persisted. "Do you know their last name? Why are you looking for him?"

Her eyes pleaded with him to answer a question he didn't know. "You truly don't know her name?" she asked. "Maia."

The syllables rang like a bell in his mind, but he didn't know who that was. "No," he said.

Her head drooped, her white hair tumbling over her sagging shoulders.

"You understand what you're saying, don't you?" he said.

Her head came up and her eyes narrowed. "Of course I understand what I'm saying," she said. "I'm a harpy, not a parrot."

He gazed at her in wonder. None of the creatures they'd caught before had demonstrated anything more than animal intelligence. Even the dryads.

She could tell them _so much_ about where she'd come from. Maybe she could even tell them things about the other creatures. How to care for them, what they needed, where they were from.

Probably it was offensive or something to call her a creature, though.

She looked away for a moment, sadness washing up over her face again. Without looking at him, she said, "Is that my dinner?"

He looked down at the bucket. It had landed bottom down again, not spilling a drop. Lucky him. "Uh. Yeah." He hoisted it and poured it into the trough.

She ate a couple of chunks with a daintiness that he hadn't seen on the video feed the other night. She licked the blood off her lips and sucked it from her fingers, but she turned away after a few minutes.

His stomach sank. The griffin had stopped eating after the first night, too, even though there hadn't been anything obviously wrong. "Aren't you hungry?"

She looked up at him through the mess of her hair. It looked like it took some effort.

God, was he that fugly in harpy-land?

"I'll eat more later," she said, her voice calm and measured. "Thank you for warming it. Cold meat is - " She shuddered, and he was captivated by the way it ran up her back and down her wings, each feather flickering softly.

It burst out of him. "What did you do to me?"

Her eyes came around to meet his.

"Last night. Maybe you don't remember it. You were pretty stoned. I mean, they'd drugged you up pretty good."

"The sleeping draft."

"Yeah, let's go with that. But you woke up for a minute. And you did this thing - you sucked in your breath and I - I felt it in my chest, like - " He felt silly. It was so _weird._

She tilted her head. "I was tasting your air," she said, as if that was a totally normal thing to do.

"My - air," he said. "Tasting it?"

Suddenly her eyes looked so sad that he had to look away, because he almost wanted to start crying. She looked like she'd lost something of infinite value.

"Harpies are storm winds," she said. "I favor the North Wind, myself. The wind of cold and snow."

"Yeah, I can see that," he said, looking at her general coloring and remembering the icy feel in his chest. Then he processed the rest of it. Oh. _Oh._ Of course. She missed flying.

"Our magic is tied to the air," she added.

 _Magic?_ She'd just said that. Right out loud, like it was a normal thing that everyone had. Maybe it was a figure of speech.

Of course, he was talking to a flying woman out of myth, so maybe he shouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as figurative language.

"Okay," he said. "So - air. You're all about it. But what's that got to do with sucking the breath out of my lungs?"

"Tasting the air from your body tells me things. I'm sorry if I frightened you. I forgot how it discomfits - mortals." That sad look ghosted over her eyes again.

"It freaked me out a little," he admitted. "But I'm okay. Just confused. So what did my air tell you?"

She bit her lip with a couple of those sharp teeth and didn't answer.

He frowned. He hadn't seriously thought that his air could tell her anything except maybe what he'd had for dinner, until she refused to answer. "Hey. What did my air tell you?"

"I don't know how to explain."

"You can just come right out and say it. Is it something bad?"

She said softly,  "That you're a stranger to yourself."

It shook him right down to his feet, how accurately it named the feeling that haunted him. His voice came out like the crack of a whip. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She turned to the trough and picked through the chunks of meat as if finding the most aesthetically pleasing one.

He knocked on the glass to get her attention, which didn't work. "Hey! Come on. What did you mean?"

She stuffed her mouth full and didn't answer, and refused to look at him again.

He fumed for a moment, muttered, "I thought centaurs were supposed to be the cryptic ones," and stalked back to the cortex.

* * *

He tried to work on his design for an expanded cell, but ended up brooding over her words for most of the night.

Maybe this was a harpy thing. Like fortune-tellers. Maybe they just said whatever they thought would get a reaction and sounded kind of believable. "Wooo, you will take a long sea journey. Wooo, you will meet someone tall, dark, and handsome. Wooo, you're a stranger to yourself."

Like. Who _didn't_ feel that way sometimes?

There was no way she could know.

* * *

When he went back with her second meal of the night, she was tucked up in a corner under her wings. "Hey," he said, trying to make his voice gentle and friendly. "Hi there. Got your food. You awake?"

She didn't budge.

"Yummy gobbets," he said. "Nice and bloody. Come and get 'em."

Her wings rustled, and he was pretty sure she was awake under there, and ignoring him.

"Look, I'm sorry if I freaked you out earlier. I just want to know why you said that. About me."

She carried on ignoring him.

He let out his breath in a huff and unhooked the hatch to pour her meal down into the trough. "Fine," he muttered. "Fine, you don't have to tell me. Why would I want to know anyway?"

When he slapped the hatch closed, he glanced over again. He could swear he saw one dark eye peeking at him through feathers and hair, but her wings rustled and hid it again.


	4. The Fourth Night

His annoyance had faded by the time he woke up that night. So she'd said something weird and cryptic. Probably it was just something harpies did. Who knew? She'd talked about magic, too. He would let it go. It was just a weird thing. He was no stranger to weird things.

_ You're a stranger to yourself. _

The words blared in his head like a siren, and he twitched and spilled his coffee. He scowled, watching coffee drip to the cracked asphalt of the Star Labs parking lot. Okay. Maybe he hadn't  _ completely _ let it go.

Whatever. Even a stopped clock was right twice a day. 

When he'd entered his notes last night, he'd left out any mention of her talking or what she'd said, because - well, he didn't know. He just hadn't, that was all. And he hadn't said anything to Hartley about it either. He wondered if he was in for a cross-examination about it.  


But Hartley didn't mention anything about the harpy talking to him, or dropping cryptic fortune cookie statements. Just a snotty remark about the coffee all over Cisco's t-shirt. Cisco flipped him off and refilled his coffee mug. 

When Hartley left, Cisco immediately pulled up the database. He frowned at the screen, scanning the record of today's activity. It was downright boring. According to the words on the screen, she'd eaten, and slept, and that was about it.

Was that because he'd been freaked out too? Or had she not said anything to Hartley?

Cisco checked her vitals - perfectly fine - and then switched over to the video feed. She was awake, sitting up with her wings folded neatly behind her. Head bowed, she was finger-combing her hair, wincing occasionally as her fingers hit a snag.

When her hair was detangled to her satisfaction, she shook the loose strands of hair off her fingers, then folded her legs up, resting her chin on her knees, looking at nothing with an expression so sad it made Cisco's eyes prickle with sympathy.

Suddenly he slammed the video feed off and spun his chair away from it, feeling sick to his stomach. A basic, immutable fact had suddenly hit him like a runaway train.

Thawne Labs was keeping a naked flying woman prisoner in a tiny cell, and they were filming her 24/7.

He caught his breath and tried to keep his dinner from coming up. They filmed everything, he argued with himself. It was science. They had to monitor all the creatures, to see what they did, what they could learn -   


But she wasn't like the other creatures. She'd spoken to him. She was looking for somebody. Or she had been before they'd locked her in that cell. She was all alone and she was so, so sad.

And. You know.

Naked.

He felt like Acteon, caught spying on Artemis while she bathed, and everyone knew what happened to that perv.

He looked over his shoulder. He'd minimized the video window, but he knew full well it was still recording. That was messed up.

He rubbed his hands over his face, thinking.

He couldn't just turn it off. Thawne and Hartley would notice right away, and they'd just turn it back on. But he could loop the footage somehow, so hopefully they wouldn't notice for awhile. It wasn't like she got up to a whole lot in there, and if she had a serious health issue, there were other sensors in the cell.

But before  _ that _ \- 

He hopped up, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out of the cortex, down to the ground floor, where there was a gift shop that had never gotten the chance to open.

* * *

He wasn't done with his project by the time he headed downstairs with her first meal of night, but he'd made a pretty good start. She was still folded up in the corner, but she looked up as he turned the corner, and watched him steadily until he'd walked all the way up to the glass.

He shifted her bucket of meat from one hand to the other. "Hey," he said.

For a moment, he wondered if her talking to him had all been some crazy fever dream, like the ones he'd had lying in the med lab after the breach. But she dipped her head and said, "Hello."

"How are you doing tonight?"

She shrugged. 

"Hungry?"

She looked at the bucket and, after a moment, nodded.

He filled the trough. She unfolded herself, her wings flaring out slightly for balance, and came over to start eating.

"Can I ask you something?"

She darted him a quick look.

"Not about what you said last night," he said.

Her wings shifted softly, saying something in her body language that hovered just out of reach of his understanding.  "What would you like to know?"

"Do Hartley and Thawne know you can talk?"

She looked blank.

"The other two that work here," he clarified. "You've probably seen them during the day. They're, uh - " Wow, now that he thought about it, they were seriously interchangeable. Two white human guys with brown hair and glasses. How was she supposed to tell them apart?

"I see one man, mostly," she said. "He brings me food. He doesn't warm it."

Hartley, he concluded. Funny, he'd've thought Thawne would be down here gloating way more often. Maybe he just watched the videos.

"I don't talk to him," she said. "I don't want to."

"So why did you talk to me?"

"I wanted to."

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Fair enough," he said finally. He studied her for a moment, trying to work out how to ask her what he wanted to know. 

She asked him something first. "What do they call you?"

It sounded funny in English, although if she'd said it in Spanish, it would have made perfect sense. Maybe harpy language was a little like that. 

"My air didn't tell you that?" he asked.  


"No," she said, seemingly unfazed by his sarcasm. 

He gave up. "Cisco Ramon."

She nodded. "And how long have the masters held you here, Cisco Ramon?"

"Just Cisco! And they're not holding me here. They're not my masters. I'm a scientist. Like them."

"You do their bidding. Like a servant."

"I - well, yeah. I'm really junior, I'm the youngest and the least experienced so - I have to pay my dues."

"You pay them to treat you like this?"

"No, it's a figure of speech, it . . ." He trailed off and cleared his throat. "Look, that's not important. I work here. I'm not anybody's servant."

She looked skeptical, and he thought it was time to change the subject. "You know my name now. What's your name?"

She blinked a few times, slowly. "It's a harpy name," she said. "Can you say it?"

"I speak English, Spanish, and Klingon," he said. "Try me."

Her eyes narrowed consideringly. Then she breathed out a series of vowels that Cisco didn't have the faintest clue how to emulate.

He blinked once or twice.

"That's as close as I can get with a mouth," she said.

"Okay, yeah, no, that's - I can't do that. I'm sorry."

She nodded, looking down. How must it feel for her, trapped in tiny cell, stranded in a world not her own, without even anybody who could call her by her name?

"Hey," he said. "You got a nickname? Something with some consonants?"

"Why?"

"I want to be able to call you something." He could call her H-1, he supposed, but what seemed to work so well with the dryads didn't seem right for her. 

She tilted her head, like a thoughtful bird. "Why don't you pick something?"

He blinked at her. "It's your name. Shouldn't you pick it?"

"I know my name," she said. "I told it to you just now. You're the one who wants to be able to call me something. So pick something."

"Caitlin," he said impulsively, plucking a name out of the air. She looked like a Caitlin to him. And he was pretty sure he'd heard something like a C and an L in what she'd said.

"Caitlin," she echoed, rolling it around in her mouth as if tasting it. 

"What do you think? You can pick something else."

"No, Caitlin is good." Her mouth curved up. "It will serve."

He smiled back at her. Caitlin. It was funny how having something to call her besides "the harpy" or H-1 changed the way he saw her. She was still a winged, ice-pale, white-haired woman with teeth and claws, but now she was a somebody.

"Hey, Caitlin," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Are clothes a harpy thing? Like, are you okay right now, being naked all the time?" He tried to gesture at her body without letting his gaze linger below her collarbones.

She considered that. "I fly in the nude," she said. "Cloth gets in the way. But I do often wear clothes to keep from getting cold on the ground."

"Do you want clothes? Are you cold?"

She looked thoughtful. "No," she said slowly. "I'm not cold. But I would welcome clothes all the same. The floor is very hard."

The flat, unemotional statement hit him right in the stomach. He swallowed hard. "Okay," he said. "All right. I'll bring you something with your next - "  _ Feeding _ , he almost said, and changed it to " - meal."

* * *

It took him most of the time between her meals, but when he came downstairs, he felt pretty smug about what he'd brought her. She looked at what he carried under his arm, eyes bright with curiosity. 

He set the bucket down and then laid out what he'd brought. "Okay. This is all from the gift shop that never opened, so it's all got the Thawne Labs logo on it. Sorry about that. So, first up, I brought you a couple of blankets in case you'd like a better - um - nest than the floor."

He pushed them through the hatch, and she picked them out of the trough Her face scrunched up as the plastic wrapping caught in her talons. 

"You have to open it," he said. "Tear the - uh - the clear stuff off and shove it back through."

She poked the plastic a few more times, eyes narrowed. Then, just as he was about to offer to do it for her, she swiped at both packages in a swift sweep of her talons. The plastic shredded like pizza cheese, but the blankets weren't so much as dented. 

Cisco told himself to close his mouth.

She swept the remains of the plastic away and shook the blankets out, examining the pattern with her head cocked to one side, as if judging them against her current interior decorating scheme of metal and more metal. Then she lifted them to her face and rubbed her face against them, shyly. "They're very soft."

It made his stomach lurch to watch her nuzzle a blanket with the logo of the lab holding her prisoner. He cleared his throat. "Yep. I've got a few at home. Can confirm, very cuddly." 

She looked up. "What else? You said clothes."

He unfolded a pair of sweatpants with the logo down one leg. "So, there's these. They've got a drawstring waist, so even if I messed up your size, they should stay up. And then this - " He held up a scrap of cloth that had once been a Thawne Labs t-shirt. He'd cut the whole back off and then used the discarded cloth to make ties that he'd sewn to the collar and the bottom hem. "So this is kind of a halter top? It was the only thing I could think of that would accommodate your wings and not impede your mobility."

She frowned at it. 

He started to feel self-conscious. "Pretty different from a peplos, right?" That was what ancient Greek dresses were called, right? Man, his brain was weird.

"Peplum are a very old-fashioned style," she said rather severely.

He grinned, self-consciousness dissolving. " _ So _ last millennium."

She blinked and then grinned back, the points of her teeth glinting. "How do you wear them?"

He showed her, draping it down his front, showing how the ties would tie behind his neck and in the small of his back. He untied it and folded it up with the pants, sliding it through through the food hatch. She took them and shook them out, pursing her lips like she was considering whether to purchase them or what. Then she put them on. 

For a lady who was probably used to dresses that were basically pinned up bedsheets, she got the hang of both pieces pretty quickly. The halter top worked just the way he'd hoped, Cisco noted. Lots of room for the wings, plenty of space for them to flex and fold. Sweet.

She finished tying the ties around her waist and smoothed the pants over her hips, looking at him as if waiting for his opinion. He nodded approvingly and gave her a thumbs-up. It was a thrown-together, improvised outfit, but she made it look sexy and punk, like there was nothing else you would wear if you had pure white hair and a six-foot wingspan.

"Thank you, Cisco Ramon. They're fine clothes."

"No problem," he said. "Anytime."  


* * *

He went back to the cortex and started cutting up more shirts, because any lady who regularly ate raw meat wasn't going to able to keep her only shirt clean for very long. 

As he worked, he decided to shut down the cameras and loop the footage now. Hartley and Thawne were too busy during the day to watch her constantly. If he spoofed the time stamp, they might not catch on for days.

It would give her privacy, anyway. He couldn't give her physical space, but he could give her that.

The question of her talking weighed on his mind, though. What if Thawne decided to review the tapes from last night or tonight for some reason? Then the cat would be out of the bag for sure. He paused in his cutting and tapped in the timestamp for last night, and then flicked on the  speakers.

An unholy cacophony of shrieks and screeches burst through them, and he jumped, accidentally closing the shears on the tender web between thumb and forefinger.

"Ow!" he yelped, dropping shears and cloth and bringing his hand up to suck at it. His own blood tasted coppery in his mouth, and there was a giant splotch of red on the half-cut shirt. But when he pulled it away, the cut was tiny, smaller than he'd expected. Well, that was something. 

He didn't give it any more thought, because of what was playing out on the monitor and over the speakers. 

Because there she was, and there he was, looking at each other, their mouths moving. But what came through the speakers was just incoherent screeches.

Was it her magic? Did it scramble the recording somehow? Why wouldn't it also scramble the video?

Or  - or was  _ she _ making those sounds? Was he?

He could still taste words on his tongue. He could have sworn it was English. But what he heard through the speakers wasn't English. It wasn't even human.

She'd done something to him. It was the only answer. Maybe when she'd breathed in the air from his lungs? Had she somehow instilled harpy language at the same time, like a virus?

He touched his throat and swallowed hard.

_ You are a stranger to yourself. _


	5. The Fifth Night

He woke up early to the buzzing of his phone. It had taken him hours to get to sleep, so he answered blearily, "Whazit."

Thawne's voice crackled in his ear. "Cisco, where are you?"

"I'sleep," he said, rolling over to squint at his clock. "S'only seven."

In spite of Cisco's snotty tone, Thawne's voice was calm and patient. "You're late for your checkup, son."

He lay blinking at his dark ceiling. "Already?"

He went in an hour early and got a checkup from Thawne twice a month, to make sure he hadn't caught anything from the monsters from other dimensions. Hadn't he done that last week? Or maybe not, if Thawne was on the phone about it. He couldn't think. He was too tired. "'Kay," he said, switching on his light. "Kay. I'll be there. Gimme like ten minutes." 

* * *

In spite of the coffee he poured for himself almost the moment he walked in, he was still so tired he nodded off as Thawne checked his temperature. "Sorry," he mumbled when the prick of the needle, drawing his blood, brought him back to wakefulness. "Didn't sleep well."

"Dreams?"

"Nah. Insomnia."

"Any other strange effects?"

Cisco stared into space.

_ I was talking with a harpy. Apparently in harpy language. That she infected me with when she sucked the breath out of my body to taste my air. Also I gave her a name. And clothes. _

"Nah," he said, because even half-asleep, he knew that if they realized she'd done something to him, he'd become an experiment, too.

"How about the moles? How many have appeared since the last checkup?"

"Six new ones," he said. "Little ones. Two on my arm, one on my knee, one on my stomach, and one on my shoulder."

"Let's have a look."

Cisco tugged off his shirt.

The moles were another mystery that nobody could seem to solve. When he'd first woken up after the breach, he'd had a few scattered over his body. Normal enough.

But every few days, a new one would turn up, chocolate-colored against his skin. Most of them were tiny pinpricks, and he would have figured them for freckles if he ever got any sun, but he didn't.  Some were bigger, a quarter of an inch or half an inch across. Twelve of them were closer to an inch in diameter.

Thawne always tested the bigger ones for cancer, but they were fine. Just pigmentation in his skin, as if it had always been there.

Neither Thawne nor Hartley had them. Only Cisco. He sometimes wondered if he'd gotten a dose of radiation from the explosion that they hadn't. Maybe all these moles would suddenly turn cancerous on him, all at once.

Well, whatever they were, they hadn't turned on him yet, so he tried not to think about it.

Thawne had completed his examination and Cisco had pulled his clothes back on when Hartley stomped in, scowling. "You," he said, spotting Cisco. "What the hell."

Cisco thought of the footage of Caitlin, on a loop, and his stomach went hard. But he slurped his coffee and said, "What," in his most bored voice.

"You made it clothes,” Hartley said flatly. "And you gave it a fucking blanky."

"The harpy? Uh, yeah, she was cold."

“It told you that?”

His stomach jittered, but his brain cut in. Figure of speech, he's mocking you, just like he always does, it doesn't mean - “She’s been naked in a mostly metal cell for three days. She didn’t have to tell me that.”

Hartley rolled his eyes. "Then turn up the heat, you moron. Don't make it clothes like some professional Instagrammer playing dress-up with her purse mutt."

Cisco's coffee cup shattered against the wall just above Hartley's head.

Cisco found himself on his feet, frozen. Everyone was frozen, Hartley cringed into an astonished crouch, Thawne staring at him, coffee dripping down the wall, pieces of mug tinkling to the floor.

There was a strange pressure all around them. It felt like the air itself was pressing down, locking them all in place, stilling their voices.

"She's not," Cisco said, and the strange tension broke with an almost audible pop. He took a breath. "She’s not a dog.”

Hartley stared at him. There were spots of coffee on his glasses, Cisco noted, and a couple of tiny ceramic shards in his hair. "God, learn about metaphors - I didn't say -"

"She's a person," Cisco said, more loudly. "Maybe she's not human but she's a person. Yeah, I gave her a couple of blankets to sleep on and clothes to wear, and I don't want any of your shit.  _ Rathaway. _ "

Hartley made a small noise.

Thawne finally spoke. "The clothes aren't doing any harm, Hartley. Ignore them."

"But - "

"Ignore them."

Hartley let out a huff and straightened his shirt and pants. There was still a little piece of broken mug in his hair. He didn’t seem to notice as he stalked out again, miffed as fuck but unable to do anything about it. 

Thawne said, "Sit down," to Cisco, who sat. They finished the checkup in silence, except for when Thawne said at the end, "Everything seems normal. Go ahead and log in."

Nobody mentioned the shattered cup and the coffee all over the wall and the fact that if Hartley had been a hair less quick to duck, Cisco would have beaned him right in the forehead.

* * *

When both Thawne and Hartley - still sulking - left for the night, Cisco went downstairs right away. She looked up, apparently surprised, her mouth already forming his name as he slapped the mike on. " - sco? You're early."

He leaned into the glass. "Hey."

"Hey," she echoed, and he smiled. She picked things up quick. 

"How's your new look? Good?"

"Good. Comfortable."

"Good." He felt reckless, rebellious. Upstairs, the shattered coffee mug was still all over the floor and the coffee was probably staining the plaster wall and guess what, he didn't give one single tiny fuck. "Hey, Caitlin."

"What?"

"You wanna fly?"

Her eyes lit up. " _ Yes. _ "

"Awesome." He stepped back. "I'm going to open your door, okay?"

With a whoosh, the door opened. She looked at it uncertainly, then climbed to her feet and stepped out. She took a deep breath and let out a sigh, as if the air of even small, temporary freedom was intoxicating.

He felt like taking in a deep breath himself. She smelled of wind and woman and some musky scent that must be bird, and it filled his head.

She rolled her shoulders and spread her wings. And spread them. And  _ spread _ them. They were so big they almost brushed the ceiling and feathers trailed across the pipes and wires in the walls. 

For a moment, fear bubbled in his stomach. He'd just let a full-grown harpy out of her cage. A full-grown harpy armed with teeth and talons and whatever she'd done with her breath. He suddenly had no doubt she could suffocate somebody with that little trick. 

Was this the last mistake he'd ever make?

But she folded her wings back in, as if she'd just wanted to stretch, and smiled broadly at him, eyes sparkling. "Where are we going?"

"We're staying right here," he said, and hit a few more buttons. Her cell shut again, and then moved, trundling off along its track. She jumped, then crept forward to peer into the darkness revealed. 

"That's the pipeline," Cisco said. "It's about five stories high and goes in a huge circle. I figure there's plenty of room for you to spread your wings. What do you think? Good?"

" _ Yes, _ " she breathed.

"Cool." He remembered she'd said that clothes got in the way when she flew, so she was probably going to want to take them off. "So I'll just go and you can - oh. Or you can do - already. Okay." 

She continued stripping off her clothes, laying them neatly out on the little bench, seemingly unconcerned with his stammering. 

He looked away, blushing. Which was weird, because he'd seen her naked for three full nights before he'd given her the clothes, and he'd done his best not to stare even then. But now that clothes were an option, it felt even more creepy and gross to gawk at her body.

When she was ready, she walked back to the door and looked over her shoulder at him, expectant. He hit the button and the door creaked open again. 

She stood poised on the lip of the abyss, mouth pursed a little as if considering. A breeze from the pipeline fluttered the ends of her hair and rustled through her feathers. There were some small holes in the roof from the explosion, Cisco knew, and probably the ventilation system sent some air through. He wondered if that was enough to create currents that her wings could catch.

Her wings flexed and bumped the edges of the doorway. She looked at them with distaste, then folded her wings back again and leapt into the darkness.

He jolted forward, yelping - " _ Caitlin!" - _ and caught himself just in time to see her wings spread wide, with an audible  _ phwoop. _ She flapped them once and shot away, a white blur in the darkness of the pipeline.

He gaped after her.

Goddamn, she was  _ fast. _

How had Hartley and Thawne even caught her?

* * *

He sat next to the pipeline for awhile, but mostly he just caught an occasional glimpse of white as she shot past the small doorway. A few times, he leaned out the great gaping maw of the pipeline to watch her dip and swoop away into the distance, but it was a long-ass way down and he didn't have wings. So he eventually went back upstairs, wondering if she'd be there when he went back with her meal.

But when he set the bucket close to the open doorway and kind of wafted the smell of warm, raw meat into the pipeline, she turned up almost immediately. For a moment, he wondered how she was going to get in, but she reached up and caught the top of the doorway, folded her wings up, and used the momentum to swing into the hallway and land lightly on her feet. 

"Good flight?"

"Wonderful," she panted. Sweat sheened her body in odd patches, and warmth rolled off her like a furnace. The wind-and-woman-and-bird smell was even stronger, but it was weirdly pleasant.

She put her clothes back on, stretched out her wings, and then carefully folded them up again. "Ooof," she said. "Four days and I've gone soft."

"Sore?"

"Tired," she said.

"Pop a squat."

She squinted at him.

"I mean, have a seat." He nodded at the bench next to him. 

She settled herself, looking like a prim lady in a Jane Austen movie (except, you know, with giant wings), and looked at the bucket. 

He picked it up and set it in her lap. "Go ahead."

She stuck her hand wrist-deep in the meat and scooped up a giant handful, shoving several chunks in her mouth at once.

He gaped. 

She swallowed. "Excuse me," she said. "I'm  _ very _ hungry."

He laughed. "Girl, you've been flying for the past hour and change. I can't imagine the kind of calories you're burning up. Scarf it down. Let me know if you need more."

She smiled at him and stuffed her mouth full again.

She'd gone through the whole bucket by the time she slowed down.  "May I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

She suppressed a burp. "Where do you go when you're not here?"

"Uh, my apartment. I go home and watch TV and sleep and - sometimes I read." Man, he had a boring life. Hard to make a whole lot of friends when you worked a twelve-hour shift every night.

"Is it far?"

"It's a building right next to this one. Ten minute walk from bed to lab, if I’m strolling.”

"Is it all yours?"

"Kind of. Except not really. There's ten or fifteen apartments in the building and I'm the only one living there. All the others are empty.”

"It sounds lonely," she said. 

He shrugged, looking away. Sometimes when he had insomnia, he would leave his apartment during the day and drift down the halls, looking at all the locked doors, thinking about the abandoned apartments behind them. "There were others, before. The apartments were built so visiting scientists and junior researchers, like me, would have someplace to live. But nobody wants to come here anymore. Understandably. So it's just me."

"What happened?" she asked. "Did they all leave because of the breach? Or did they perish?"

He realized that she must have seen it from the other side, in her world, and would have had no explanation. She didn't know how the explosion had devastated parts of Central City, and how the resulting breach and the creatures that came through it had done yet more damage. She didn't know Thawne Labs and all its employees were scientific pariahs.

"Some of them died," he said. "Most of them left."

She leaned forward, eyes glittering. "Who caused the breach? And how? And why?"

"Hey. Nobody did it on purpose. It was an accident. An explosion that ripped a hole between worlds."

Her eyes narrowed. "What happened?"

"Ah, well, this - " He waved at the pipeline, and then more generally around them at the building. "Was the particle accelerator. I don't know if I can explain exactly what it was supposed to do - "

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Why don’t you try?”

He flushed. "Uh. Okay. So. Everything in existence, right, is made up of these tiny, um, pieces - "

"You mean atoms." She raised her brows at him. "I am more learned than you think, even if I do eat raw meat." As if to underscore her point, she reached into the bucket and plucked out a little scrap that she'd missed.

"Okay," he said. "Got it. Did you know they can be broken open?"

Her eyes lit with interest as she sucked blood from her talons. "Can they?"

"Yeah, it's pretty sweet! There are these little particles inside, and well,  _ that _ \- " He waved a hand again. "Was supposed to bash them together."

"Why?"

"To see what they would do."

"It sounds like the work of gods."

"Not gods," he said. "Just humans. Humans who didn't really know what they were doing. Like that's ever stopped them."

"Humans are foolish," she agreed.

He eyed her. "When you say gods - is that a figure of speech?"

She said, "No, why would it be?"

"So - there are gods? Real gods? Where you come from?"

"Yes. Aren't there here?"

"This world prefers gods to be far away and pretty much silent, and sometimes dead." She looked shocked, and skeptical. He shrugged. "It seems to work. Did you ever meet one of your gods?"

She gave him a funny look. "Yes," she said slowly. "On a number of occasions."

"What were they like?"

"They can pass for human if they choose. They often do, to conduct business in the mortal world. But some feel the difference in them, even if they are in hiding. A sense. A presence of something more."

He absorbed that, thinking about it. He very rarely saw anyone besides Hartley or Thawne. Would he have that sixth sense, about a god in hiding? Or would his eyes pass right over them? "What about when they're not in hiding?"

Her lips curved in a wide grin, and her eyes lit with humor and mischief. " _ That _ ," she almost purred, "is a glorious sight."

Oh.

Uh.

Wow.

If he felt weird about gawking at her body while she was stripping down to fly, he felt weirder about getting turned on by the glitter in her eye and the glint of her teeth. He hadn't realized he had such a thing for dangerous women, but obviously he did.

She put her hand out and touched his wrist, and he almost jumped out of his skin. She pulled her hand back quickly. The laughter died out of her face, and her shoulders sagged. 

"No," he said. "It's okay, I wasn't expecting - is all - "

"I wanted to ask you what it was like,” she said. "The breach. Did you see it?"

He swallowed, feeling embarrassed for no reason. It wasn’t like it was his fault. "I - uh. Well, yes. Technically yes."

"What do you mean?"

"I know I saw it, because I was here, working, when it happened. And I know that because I got hurt. Knocked out, in fact. For a week. But I can't tell you what it was like, because I don't remember."

"You don't remember the explosion?"

He swallowed again, digging his nails into his knees through the cords he wore. "I don't remember anything. My life before waking up three years ago is just a blank. Thawne had to tell me my own name, and what I was doing here, and what had happened to me."

She let out a soft, "Aaaahhhhh," as if something had come clear. "Is that why you stay here? It's all you know?"

He looked away. "I work here," he said. "I work a lot of hours here. And I get paid enough to get food delivered and I have a roof over my head and - I - yeah. I guess right now I'm staying here because the world seems too big to go out in it and find out all the things I don't know. I wouldn't even know my own family if I ran into them on the street." He shrugged. "Well, that's actually not a great loss, because I was in a coma for a week and they didn't come see me during or after. So I guess I know what that relationship is like."

"Do you think they'll come back? The memories."

"At first I thought they would. I'd wake up one day and hey presto! I'd have everything back again. But it's been three years, and still, every time I try to think further back than the day I woke up in the med lab, there's like - " 

"A wall," she said. 

His head whipped around. "Yeah. There's a wall. I even dream about it sometimes. A literal wall, tall and high and I can't get over or under."

She reached out and took his hand, and this time he didn’t jump. “You will break it down,” she said in unexpectedly fervent tones. “I believe this. You will crush that wall into rubble and you’ll remember everything that was important to you.”

It touched him in a place that all of Thawne’s reassurances had left cold. He laughed a little. “Do harpies tell the future?” 

She smiled at him. “In this case, I do.”

He smiled back at her, feeling heat well up in his cheeks. Great. He was crushing on his captive. Way to be a cliche there, Ramon. He cleared his throat. "What did it look like on your end?"

"I didn't see it either," she said. "Not the first one."

"Wait," he said. "That doesn't make sense. You came through it. How could you not see it? Did you get, like, sucked through? What happened?" Something else registered. "What do you mean, the first one?"

"My sister and her husband helped me to open one from our side, just big enough for me to slip through. But they couldn't keep it open for long. It closed behind me."

"When was this?"

She met his eyes. "Five days ago."

"Five - " He was struck dumb. 

"You didn't know? The others didn't tell you?"

"No, they didn't say a word." He jumped to his feet, rubbing his hands over his hair. 

"Maybe they didn't see it," she offered.

He gave his head an impatient shake. "Even if they weren't standing right under it when it opened up, we've got sensors for everything. The alarms would be going off like crazy. No way they didn't know."

"They did turn up to catch me very fast," she said thoughtfully.

He turned to look at her. "Why would they not say anything?"

She tilted her head. "And what other secrets do they keep from you?"


	6. The Sixth Night

Cisco tossed and turned for hours before he fell into a fitful sleep, wondering why he'd been kept in the dark. He pictured several ways to have it out with them. A direct confrontation appealed the most.

But if they were keeping more secrets, maybe it was best to pretend to be oblivious Cisco still, and do his own research. Who knew what more lies Thawne would spin out for him?

Still, Cisco felt like punching Hartley's smug face when he went in, and Hartley himself seemed to be avoiding Cisco's eyes and pretending he wasn't there. Of course, Cisco had thrown a coffee mug at him last night. So.

When he went to check the enclosure, another dryad was dead. It took him several minutes of searching to find the tiny body, huddled in the crook of a tree. Cisco wiped his eyes and blew his nose as he recorded it deceased in the database and fed the body into the cremation oven. 

Luckily for him, Hartley was already gone for the night when he went back to the cortex. He never would have heard the end of it if the other man had caught him crying over the dryads. 

Cisco shook his head. There wasn’t anything he could do about the dryads dying, not unless he could rip a hole back to their own dimension and send them home. It hurt more, somehow, to know that a breach had opened, and they could have gone home again if they'd only known. If they'd only been free.

Of course, Caitlin had said it was only big enough for her, and it had closed up again right away. So maybe there hadn't been a chance at all.

Why had she come? 

To look for the son of Maia, he concluded, remembering what she'd said the first time she'd spoken to him. Maybe Maia was the sister who had helped her. Maybe there was a little harpy boy out there wandering around, eating pigeons

Or worse, maybe there was a little harpy boy's corpse, burnt to ash by the army.

He pushed that thought away and wiggled the mouse to wake up the monitor. On the video feed, Caitlin was pacing back and forth, but that was the looped footage. He clicked on the first display to glance at her vitals.

Everything was flat. Heartbeat, breathing, all of it.

He went cold from his hair to his toes. His stomach tied itself into a horrified knot. “No,” he breathed. 

He rushed down to the pipeline, running flat out. “No, no, no, not her - “ 

She was huddled in a corner of the cell, her wings spread over her, the blankets he'd given her piled in a nest under her body. Had she died in her sleep? Or had she curled up in them when she felt herself getting weaker, her life flickering like a spent candle?

He’d done this. He’d looped the footage so she looked like she was doing fine, when she was sick or dying, and neither Hartley nor Thawne had spotted it in time - 

This was his fault, and now he would have to take her down to the freezer and - No. He didn't know what he'd do, but he wouldn't let her be frozen as a specimen, in a case next to the chimera and the griffin.

He slammed his hand down on the door release and leapt inside the moment it had opened wide enough for him to do so. “Caitlin,” he babbled, sinking to his knees beside her. “Not you, please, not you - “

He pressed two fingers to her throat where he'd seen her pulse beating so strongly - so strongly, how was this possible? - just last night. 

Her skin was warm, and for a split a second, he thought he'd just missed her, that she'd just breathed her last breath all alone -

And then her pulse thumped under his fingertips. 

He gaped. He'd checked out of habit, out of desperate hope. He'd never expected to find her still alive.

"Cisco?” she said, blinking up at him. “What is it?”

“Are you okay?”

"Of course I am."

"But - your vitals - ” His hands were shaking. He braced them on his thighs.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I was asleep." She scowled at him. "You woke me up."

He looked her over, head to toe. She was breathing fine. He'd felt her heartbeat. She didn't look weak or pale or sick. She did look kind of grumpy, like you would if some crazy man burst into your bedroom and started manhandling you and babbling at you.

"Sorry," he said, getting to his feet. "I - sorry. It's okay. Go back to sleep."

"As if I could," she grumbled, sitting up. 

He went to check the control panel outside the door, and found it blank, and a cable hanging loose. When he clicked it back into place, the readout flickered for a moment, and then settled into reassuring numbers and graphs. He stared at it for a moment. 

Adrenaline, running wild with no place to go, jittered through his system. He rubbed his hands over his face and breathed deeply, two or three times. Technical difficulties. That's all this had been. He'd thought -

But it wasn't true, she was fine.

He breathed again.

When he turned back to look in the cell, she'd gotten up and was rubbing her face and working her fingers through her hair.

"Hey," he said. "I said I was sorry. You can go back to sleep. It's okay."

"I've been sleeping all day," she said, shaking out her blankets and folding them up. It was a surprisingly homey sort of task. Almost enough to make you forget she was a prisoner on a world not her own. "I should get up." She looked at him, abashed. "I'm not very cheerful when I wake. I'm sorry I snapped at you."

"Considering you could have disemboweled me instead, I'm okay with a snarl," he said dryly. He turned to go.

"Cisco?"

Her voice drew him back around. Were harpies related to sirens? "Yeah?"

She rest her hand on the edge of the door. He'd left it open. “What were you afraid of?" she asked him. 

"Nothing. It's okay."

"You keep saying that, but you were in a panic when you woke me. What is it?"

He swallowed. "I thought you'd died."

"Died? Why?"

He waved a hand at the control panel. "This, um. This machine shows me your heartbeat. Your breathing. How you're doing when you're in that cell."

She looked at the panel in surprise. He wondered what she'd thought it was. Or maybe she hadn't wondered. Everything here must be so strange to her that this panel and its graphs wouldn't stand out. 

He went on, "It wasn't showing anything."

"But why were you so upset?"

"Because! I thought you'd died. I said."

"But - "

The words spilled out of his mouth like water from a broken jug. "And I know we're literally from different worlds, and that I'm one of your jailers, and we barely know each other, but I - I care about you. You're this funny, smart, amazing person and if I lost you like I lost the others, I - it would break my heart, okay?"

He slammed his mouth shut before he said anything else. Anything worse.

She stared at him. Her lips were soft and parted. He wanted to kiss them. "That's - I - "

He looked away. "Weird. I know. I didn't mean to dump all that on you. Forget about it, okay?"

"I don't want to," she said. "I knew you cared, because you're a caring person, but I didn't know you felt that much."

"You're not obligated to return my feelings or anything," he said. "You know that, right?"

A mishmash of expressions flashed over her face, and she looked away. 

He looked down at his feet. "I'm gonna," he said. "Got things. To do. Uh. Want me to open up the pipeline so you can get some flying time in?"

"Yes," she said, stepping out of her cell. "If you don't mind."

"No problem," he said. "No problem." He hit the buttons and the cell clanked away. He left before she took off, hurrying back to the cortex to kick himself repeatedly.

* * *

When he came back with her dinner, she was waiting for him already, perched on the edge of the bench. "The others," she said, taking the bucket from him and setting it down without touching a bite. "The ones you mentioned earlier. They weren't your fault."

He eyed her. "You don't know that. You don't even know what they were."

"A chimera and a griffin," she said. "And - dryads? I think?"

"How do you know about those?"

She nodded at the pipeline. "I taste the whisper of their last breaths in my cell."

"Holy shit," he said, vaguely aware that he was already okay with the idea of air molecules carrying information. "The griffin was months ago. The chimera was nearly three years ago."

"It's very faint. If it was outdoors, it would be gone entirely."

"God, I'm sorry. That must be so creepy."

"Creepy? Why?"

"To taste a creature's dying breath?"

She shook her head. "I have tasted many creatures' last breaths. And they at least died at peace. I could tell."

"At peace or not, they're still dead on our watch," he said. "It's like they came here to die. There was a dryad, tonight, before I came running down here like a crazy person.  I guess that's why I flipped out. Every time there's another one, I feel like the goddamn Grim Reaper, you know?"

"Who?"

"Sorry. This world's personification of Death."

"You're not Thanatos," she said firmly. "Trust me."

"I know I'm not, I just - I feel like it's something I'm doing."

"It's not."

"The two big ones were wounded already. I get that. But the dryads, I don’t understand. I feed them, I give them lots of water and nice trees. I do everything I can think of. But they keep dying. What am I missing?"

"Nothing," she said. "All a dryad needs is its tree. Its own tree, where it was born."

"And their trees aren't here," he said. "And there's no way of getting back to them. It's not like we're going to fire up the particle accelerator again to punch a hole between worlds. Look what happened last time."

"Maybe there's another way."

He swallowed. "You got a plan for that?"

"Yes," she said. 

He blinked at her, but she didn't elaborate. "Gonna share?"

She considered him. "It's . . . not ready yet," she said.

"Well, until it is, they're going to keep dying, aren't they?"

She nodded. 

He traced a constellation between four or five of the tiny moles on the back of his hand. "And it's always when I'm there. Neither Hartley nor Thawne have ever had a creature die on them, but me - " He remembered the chimera putting his head in Cisco's lap and breathing out its last breath, and the griffin curled up, its pitiful slit-pupiled eyes gazing into Cisco's own before they clouded over. "All the time. Do creatures only die at night in your world, or what?"

"No," she said. "But wounded creatures often drag themselves to a safe, quiet place to die. Maybe they did come here for that."

"Great," he said. "If that's supposed to make me feel better, it doesn't."

“It's not always a comfortable duty to be responsible for the dead,” she slowly as if measuring her words. “But I believe that it’s a duty you are up to.”

“You’ve only known me a few days,” he said. “Why do you think that?”

"I know you better than you think." She touched the back of his hand, tracing the same constellation that he had earlier. “It hurts you to think of them dying far from home. And given the choice between being there for them and letting them die alone, I think you would choose the first, no matter how much it hurts.” She peered at him keenly. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” he said. “You’re not wrong.”

Studying her fingers on the back of his hand, she said distantly, "I realized something when I was flying. Why you were so upset."

His face got hot. "Look, I - "

"I'm sorry you were worried," she said. "There was no need. It never crossed my mind that you didn't know I’m immortal."

The floor seemed to slide sideways under him. "Immortal," he said. "Like can't die? Won't die? That kind of immortal?"

"There's only the one kind," she said.

"But - so - nothing can hurt you ever?"

"I can get injured or sick, but I'll always be able to heal, eventually."

He gaped at her. That was happening a lot. "How does that happen?"

"The usual way. My father was a minor sea-god and my mother was an ocean nymph. My sisters and I will all live forever."

"Oh, totally run-of-the-mill," he said in a high-pitched voice. "Wait. Are you a-a goddess?" Fuuuuuuck. No wonder she'd given him such a funny look yesterday when he'd asked if she'd ever seen a god.

"No," she said. "I have duties and powers, but I’m not a goddess. Just immortal."

"Oh, just," he said.

He wanted to sit down, and then realized he already was. For a moment, he just sat, trying to take it in.

Immortal.

As if she sensed he needed some absorption time, she picked up the bucket and started eating quietly, leaving him to his thoughts.

It felt too big for him to grasp. Life wasn’t a one-way trip. Everyone knew that. It was the deal. You arrived with the fates already measuring out your lifespan, shiny scissors at the ready to snip it off when your time was done.

Except that the thread of Caitlin's life would span eternity.

How long had she been alive already? How many thousands of years? His puny life must seem like a hiccup to her.

“So,” he said, focusing on something he could grasp. “So you - you have sisters?”

“Four,” she said, picking out chunks of meat and eating them one by one.

“Four harpy sisters,” he said. “Must’ve been fun sharing a bathroom as kids.”

But she shook her head. “Two of them are harpies. The other two are  minor goddesses. Iris and - “ She grimaced. “Arke.”

“You don’t talk about Arke in your family?”

“She made a choice, a long time ago,” Caitlin said. “She’s paying for it now.”

It sounded like a touchy topic. He left it behind. “And Iris,” he said. “Wait. The rainbow goddess Iris?”

“That's her,” Caitlin said proudly.

“And who’s Maia? Is that another one of your sisters?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Maia is the mother of - well. Of my husband.” She said the word carefully, as if testing it out.

“Your husband,” Cisco said dumbly. Next to immortality, this shouldn't have been a shock, but it hit him center of the chest. “You’re married?”

“Yes,” she said, watching him as if his reaction meant a great deal to her.

And he'd basically dumped all his feelings in her lap a couple of hours ago. Probably why she was telling him now. Warning him off. Be cool, he told himself, be chill, don’t be a dick. "Married. Cool. That's great. You guys been together long?"

"Pretty long," she said.

What was long, to an immortal? Decades? Centuries? "So he's, like, a guy harpy? Is there a special word for a guy harpy?"

"A male harpy is just a harpy," she said. "And no, he's not. He's a god."

Well. 

Fuck me, Cisco thought. 

Not only was he crushing on his immortal interdimensional captive, not only does she already have a husband, that husband is someone you don't stand a chance against.

Well. Not like he'd ever thought there was a chance.

"Wow," he said. "Wow. Uh. Which one? Anyone I'd know about?"

She looked wretched. "Some magic is stopping my mouth. I can't say his name. Not since I arrived. I’m surprised I can even speak this much of him."

"Sorry," he said. "That must be hard."

"It is." She scowled. "It's made things very difficult."

"What's he like?"

Her eyes went soft. "He's brilliant," she said. "Clever. Tricky, even. Funny." She rolled her eyes a little. "And he knows it. And his smile - when he smiles, he's beautiful."

"Yeah, I've heard gods rank pretty high on the hottie scale."

"He can be so kind. And when something rouses his wrath - that's a sight to see.” 

“You miss him.”

“I miss him very much. The way he kisses me, the way he makes me laugh, the way we work together. I feel like I’m missing half of myself.”

"You think he's okay?"

"Yes," she said without hesitation. "Physically. But there's something else keeping him from me."

"And you're never going to find out what that is, stuck in here." His hands flexed on the bench.

She cocked her head a little and shrugged.

"Look,” he said. "I can't let you go, not right away. I'm really sorry. Because if I do, the first thing Thawne will be to notify the military that a harpy's loose. I mean, they hate each others' guts, but they'll work together. The minute they find out, you'll be at the bottom of a smoking hole in the ground. Immortal or not, that would need some recovery time."

She nodded, her head dipping. "I know."

"I can't let you go until we know for certain where your husband is, and how we're going to retrieve him."

Her eyes lifted. "We?"

"Sure," he said. "I'm kind of a sucker for true love. I'm going to help. First thing I'll do is hunt through the computer."

"Computer," she echoed, baffled.

"It's a box - kind of thing. With memories in it. I'm going to look through the memories and see if Thawne got any information about a mysterious person who fell through the breach. If he’s got something - well, we’ll go from there, okay?”

She considered him for a long moment, then set the bucket aside, cleaned out and emptied. "Yes," she said. "Yes. I think you should do that."

* * *

Upstairs, Cisco settled himself in front of the computer and pulled up the creature database where he entered his nightly notes. The place to start had to be the U files.

Every time they got a sighting or a report of a creature, they had to enter it in the database as a U for unknown, even if they had a good idea what it might be. They were up to U105 or something like that. 

They were pretty skimpy files, with any information they had on it in the notes, things like "described as half-man, half-horse, possibly centaur." The ones they'd caught or recovered were noted by "new designation" and a cross-reference.

If Thawne Labs had gotten even a whiff of Caitlin's husband, he'd be in the U files. Cisco toyed with what the designation would be if they figured out he was a god. G-1? GD-1? It made him snicker.

Would Thawne Labs treat a god any differently than it did a dryad, or a harpy?

That thought sobered him back up again.

He plodded his way through the U files, which were incredibly depressing.

U-40: "Multi-headed creature, reported as lion/goat/serpent. Captured 1/18. New designation C-1" That had been the chimera.

U-41: "Winged horse. Deceased no remains" That meant the army had caught it, and subsequently slaughtered it.

U-42: PASSWORD

He paused and blinked at the screen.

Password?

Since when was anything passworded?

* * *

By morning, he’d combed through all the rest of the U files and found nothing that might even remotely be Caitlin’s missing husband, except maybe the passworded file. He tried everything he could think of to crack that and gotten nothing for his trouble. 

When Hartley came in, grunting and scowling, Cisco was careful to have his back turned and his voice light as he packed up his things. "Hey, you know anything about the passworded files in the database?"

The glass between the cortex and the med lab acted like a mirror if you angled yourself just right. Cisco was, of course, positioned just right to see Hartley go stiff and still. 

Points to him, though, his voice was perfectly casual as he said, "There aren't any passworded files in the database."

"There's at least one. I went to add something, hit the wrong number, and all of a sudden it's asking me for a password." Cisco laughed. "I thought Thawne had fired me and not told me. So that's news to you?"

"Shit, Ramon, I don't know. Probably something the army wants kept under wraps. You know how they are."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, you don't have a guess about the password, do you?"

"You moron, what use would a password be if everybody knew it?"

"Right," Cisco said.

So. Hartley knew exactly what was in the file and what the password was.

How was he going to get his hands on that info?


	7. The Seventh Night

He filled Caitlin in on the mystery of the U-file when he let her out to fly the pipeline the next night, almost as soon as Hartley had left. She nodded, far more sanguine than he would have been in this situation. Of course, she'd been at this longer. Or maybe immortality taught you patience. 

“I’ll crack it,” he said. “I love a puzzle.”

She gave a secret little smile, which made his heart skip a beat, and launched herself out into the darkened pipeline.

When he brought her meal to her, he had no better news than his continued failure at hacking. But before he could say that, she said, "Cisco, who is the other man that’s here at night?"

"What? What other man?"

She pointed straight up. "I saw him when I was flying, in a room on the top floor. He’s been there every night.”

“Top floor’s just empty offices,” he said. “Nobody uses that.”

She cocked a brow at him. "Are you calling me a liar or a fool?"

He made a face at her. "Okay, I believe you, I just didn't know it was getting used. Is he there now?"

She nodded. 

Maybe it was Thawne. Getting caught up on paperwork and stuff. It wasn't like this place ran itself, precisely, with only three people. He held up a finger and went to the control panel, which was a repurposed tablet like the one on the dryad’s enclosure. He minimized the vitals and sorted through photos on the network until he found one of Thawne. "Is it this guy?"

"No," she said. "That man brings me food in the day. I told you about him."

"He brings you the food? I thought it was Hartley." Cisco sat back, puzzled. He could swear that Hartley was doing the daytime feedings. Why would they lie? Was that what they'd told him? Or had he misunderstood somehow?

_Mr. Rathaway has all his fingers,_ Thawne had said that first night.

He scrolled through photos again and found a shot of Hartley. "Is this him? The man you saw upstairs."

She looked. "Yes," she said. "He was looking at boxes with glass windows. Like this one, except bigger."

Cisco frowned at the image of Hartley on the screen. "Have you ever seen him before?"

"The day I was captured, and the day they gave me the sleeping draught and brought me up to the other room."

"No other times."

"No."

"What is he doing up there?”

* * *

No matter what he threw at the passworded file, it refused to crack. It didn't help that his brain was ping-ponging between that and Hartley, up on the top floor when Cisco had always thought he was 100% alone in Thawne Labs at night, except for the creatures.

If he was honest with himself, it was pretty fucking creepy. 

He thought about just going up there. Taking the elevator, opening doors until he found the one that Hartley was using, and getting right in his face. "Hey, Hartley, what's happening?"

Did Hartley actually sleep here? But she hadn't mentioned a bed, just computers. Plus, why would Hartley sleep in a dusty office when there were all those empty furnished apartments across the parking lot?  And anyway, he'd always thought Hartley had an apartment in town. He could have sworn Hartley said something about that once.

It just didn't make sense. Hartley was the day guy. He was the night guy. What was the point of having two night guys? That left Thawne all on his own to monitor the daily activity. 

(There was a black hole that his calculations moved and danced around. A thought he didn't want to think.)

And another thing. If that office was on the top floor, how was Caitlin seeing it? 

He pulled up schematics of Thawne Labs, paying careful attention to the damage from the explosion. None were large enough for a full grown woman to fit through, and that was before you counted the wings. But she'd seen it in some way. 

Her, he could ask. So he did, the minute he took her second meal down to her. 

"Hey, about the room on the top floor - "

"Hmmm?" She was pulling her pants back on, smelling of wind and sweat. 

"How did you get up there close enough to see him?"

"Through a hole in the ceiling."

"I checked that. There's no hole big enough for you to get through." He narrowed her eyes. "Your body, anyway."

She smiled at him.

Something sparked. He thought, _no way, impossible_ \-  but he was talking to an immortal flying woman from another dimension who was married to a god, so impossible wasn’t so much of a thing, now was it? 

"When you told me your name, you said something about, that's the best I can do with a mouth. Implying that sometimes you say your name  _ without _ a mouth. Or a tongue, or a throat, or - Caitlin."

"Yes."

"Can you transform?"

She dissolved. There was no other word for it. One minute she was there, and the next minute, her clothes hung in the air, empty, before being tossed aside by the blast of bitter cold wind that suddenly filled the hallway. 

It swirled around him, tossing his hair, sending chills up and down his spine. He spun around to find her re-forming at the base of the ramp, naked, smiling crookedly. "Yes."

"When you said you were a storm wind, I thought you were being poetic!"

"I'm not very poetic."

He shivered. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees at least. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "That's not airtight. Your cell."

"No."

"You could have left at any time."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you?"

She dissolved again, and the cold wind picked up her clothes and poured into them until she took shape again, six inches away. "I wanted to be with you."

He blinked dumbly at her -  _ me, what do you mean me  _ \- and when she put her hand to his face he was still trying to figure out why she'd said that, so he was taken aback when she pressed her lips to his.

Her mouth was soft and cool, and warmth shot down his spine. He put his hands to her waist, and then slid them around the small of her back, letting himself fall into the kiss for a heady moment.

But just one moment.

He pulled away. "Caitlin," he said softly. "I - I'm - it's not that I'm not interested. Believe me. But you're here, in this world, looking for your husband. And I know gods do things differently and I'm not trying to throw shade on whatever arrangement you have with him. But do you really think this is the best time to start something?"

That sadness filled her eyes again. She turned her head away. "No, I see now that won't work."

He dropped his hands, feeling horrible. Turning someone down was about a billionty times worse when it was somebody you'd really like to have said "yes" to.

"I'm, uh, I think maybe I should go take a few more cracks at that file," he said.

"Okay," she said in a dull voice, and turned toward her dinner.

* * *

His concentration was shot, and when Hartley came in, yawning and complaining about the morning commute, Cisco could barely look at him. Liar. What morning commute? Down the fucking elevator? 

He almost ran out of the cortex and across the parking lot, not even breaking stride when he heard Thawne's voice calling out to him. He pretended he hadn't heard.

He wandered around his apartment in a daze, completely forgetting to eat. He made himself go to bed but he lay there staring at the thin knife of sunlight sneaking around the edge of the thick curtains while his brain spun and churned and tangled itself into knots.

Every time he wrenched it away from one topic -  _ Hartley in the secret room - _ it leapt to another one -  _ Caitlin, kissing him  _ \- and then another -  _ U-42, the mysterious creature. _

Whatever Hartley was doing up there, it had to have something to do with U-42, because they sure as hell hadn't told him. In fact, he'd always thought Hartley lived somewhere in the city and went home at night. What was he doing holed up in an empty office on the fifth floor?

His brain abruptly jumped tracks and reminded him that Caitlin had kissed him.

He shut his eyes and let himself remember the pressure of her lips, the curve of her waist under his hands, the way her feathers trailed over his arms as he pulled her close.

He shook his head hard and thought,  _ Her husband is probably U-42, and you promised her you'd help find him. Now think! _

But what did Hartley and the secret room have to do with it?

Around one in the afternoon, he accepted there was no way he was getting to sleep. He got up and drifted around his apartment. He tried to eat something, remembering that he'd skipped dinner, but the microwave meal sat uneasily in his stomach and he threw half of it away. He tried to eat some bread, liberally drizzled with honey, and that sat a little better.   


He pulled the thick blackout curtains open, coughing at the dust they stirred up. Damn. He should open these more often.

The sun blazed outside, hot and white in the sky. He leaned against the glass, feeling its warmth seep into his blood. 

From the very beginning, Hartley was the day guy and he was the night guy. He remembered that. Hartley had mocked him for it. _Gotta pay your dues, Ramon. We all did._

Why did any lab need two night guys for creatures that were mainly diurnal?

Something was crumbling in his head. Stones wrenching loose. His thoughts reeled away, toward Caitlin. 

Why had she stayed?

She and her sister and brother-in-law had struggled to replicate the breach for three years. She'd come to a whole other dimension, one that had already swallowed so many creatures from her world and killed most of them.

For her husband. For the man - the god - who made her eyes light up when she talked about him. 

But she'd stayed at Thawne Labs, and she said that she'd stayed for him. For Cisco. Why? How did that make sense? 

Unless -

Unless Thawne Labs only had one night guy after all.

One night guy, and U-42. The creature that Hartley monitored. 

Caitlin’s husband. 

He let out a cry as pain knifed through his head, like a wall cracking open, crumbling down. He folded to his knees, clutching his head.

Lying panting on the floor, he stared through the window at the blue sky, pierced with the spear-like towers of Thawne Labs. He so rarely saw a blue sky. It looked too blue, somehow, or not blue enough - wrong, anyway. 

He could picture the breach there, directly above the lab, a ring of boiling blue-white energy, a hole cut between worlds by foolish mortals, messing with that they didn't understand. Ever since the days of Prometheus and Pandora, mortals had gravitated to what they didn't understand, to what could destroy them. 

And it had been his job to keep them from destroying themselves completely.

He saw the breach again. Still. same breach, different sky. He saw creatures from his world dragged through, clawing and screaming at the air. 

He'd flown closer, close enough to see that it was far different than he'd expected. A whole world on the other side. What had those fool mortals done now?

He'd thrown himself through, determined to get his poor creatures back, to find the idiots who'd done this, and to close up this breach.

And, if he was honest, to satisfy his own curiosity. His kind had no sins, but if he were to admit to a slight personal flaw, it was curiosity. He was a little bit human in that way.

(More than slight, his wife would sniff when she was annoyed with him. She would purse her pretty lips until he kissed them soft again.)

No sooner had he burst through into the other world than something had exploded almost in front of him. It threw him hundreds of feet through the air, away from the breach. 

With a curse - how  _ dare _ they - he'd pulled himself up and hurled a boom through the sky until it crashed into what had done this and sent it screaming to earth. He'd caught a glimpse of it.

It wasn't a creature, it was some kind of chariot, one that flew. There were men inside, and blades whirling atop it and to the rear. It slammed into the ground and went up in a great fireball.   


But there were more of them, all around him, mingled with the wild, frightened creatures from his own world. They hurled  _ things _ at the poor griffins, the chimerae, the pegasi - things that exploded, things that engulfed them in flames and sent them screaming to the ground like comets. 

He threw boom after boom, knocking the things off course. But they changed direction, mid-air, as if they had minds of their own, and rocketed toward him until they exploded all around him and done what no monster had done in eons - 

Knocked him out of the sky.

As he plummeted to earth, he'd looked up to see the breach, still huge and obscene, a gaping gash of wrongness, and one of the mortals' mad flying chariots tumbling toward it, and he'd thought  _ No, you stay out, that's mine _ -

With the last of his strength, he'd reached out and hauled it closed. 

He'd been out cold before he hit the earth, a strange cold earth that was not his own.

When he woke briefly, swimming to consciousness, he'd heard voices, and thought,  _ The mortals have me. _

His tunic and sandals were gone. Burned away? Taken and discarded? It didn't matter. He was strapped down, wrists and ankles, waist and head. He was almost too weak to move, let alone break out of his restraints, fly away, and open a breach back home to take what creatures survived back with him. He needed time and rest before he was in any state for that.

_ But I can't let them know what they have,  _ he'd thought groggily. If there was one thing about mortals, they would use and use with no thought for good or evil. 

Letting his eyes slide closed again, he'd sunk deep inside himself. _ Hide,  _ he thought.  _ Lock yourself away. Build a wall. And then when you're ready - _

_ Break it down again. _

He came back to himself on the floor of the apartment where he'd lived for the past three years, the ugly cheap carpet pressing patterns into his cheek, and knocks hammering at the door.

He lay panting for a few moments. Then he sat up and immediately vomited.

He wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. "Better out than in, I guess," he muttered, and got up. His knees trembled.

Ugh. Bodies.

Ignoring the now-thunderous knocks, he picked up the water bottle on the table, abandoned from his dinner. He took a huge gulp and swished it around his mouth, then spat it out in the sink. He did it again until his mouth didn't taste like vomit. He ignored the reeking puddle on the floor and looked around his apartment for a few moments. 

How  _ small _ this life had been. 

How small it had been kept.

The knocks stopped and a key scraped in the lock. Cisco went and opened it. "Thawne," he said. 

"Cisco," Thawne said. "Are you okay?"

"Me?" Cisco said. "I'm fine."

The man's eyes narrowed. "Are you sure? You didn't look so good when you were going home. I called out to you but you didn't answer. And then you didn't answer the door." 

He shrugged. "Just thinking some things over. Sorry if it looked like I was ignoring you."

"Can I come in?"

Cisco glanced down at the key in Thawne's hand. He'd never known Thawne had a key to his place.

Of course, he'd never known this was a cell, not a home.

He gave the director a bright meaningless smile. "Sure, come in if you want."

Thawne came in and shut the door behind him. He looked down at the floor. "Is that vomit?"

"Oh, yeah, just had an upset stomach for a minute there. I'm better now it's out."

Thawne met his eyes again. He reached out and put his hand on Cisco's shoulder. "Are you sure? We can take you in to the lab. Have a checkup."

Cisco resisted the urge to break the man's hand off at the wrist. "Thanks for your concern," he said. "I'm doing real good now, as a matter of fact."

"Well," Thawne said. "I'm glad to hear it."

His hand was still on Cisco's shoulder. Heavy, warm. Fatherly, almost.

Cisco stared into his eyes. "You're the first thing I remember," he said slowly. "You know that?"

"Well," Thawne said. "Yes, actually."

"I woke up in that med lab and I looked at you, and I said, 'What happened? Where am I? And  _ who _ am I?' And what'd you say? You remember?"

Thawne's narrow face softened. "I said, 'Your name is Francisco Ramon. You're at Thawne Labs. You've worked here for six months. There was an accident, and you've been in a coma for the past five days. I'm glad you're awake.'"

Cisco nodded, his mouth crooking up. "Yeah," he said. "That's what you said, all right."

Quick as a striking snake, he slammed his fist into Thawne's nose. 

The man's head snapped back, and as his eyes rolled up, he staggered back until he rammed into the door and collapsed against it, sliding to the ground.

Cisco waited until his dazed eyes focused again. "And almost every word was a lie," he said.

"Cisco," Thawne said, his voice thick. Blood dribbled from his nose and splashed over his lips. "What - "

"Get a good look," Cisco said. "Your prize is making a break for it."

For a split second, he thought he might be rusty. It had been three years, after all, and this world was not his own. But when he flung out a hand to the side and twisted in the old familiar way, the fabric of reality tore open obediently.

"Nice,"  he said. "Still got it."

He stepped through without a backward glance, leaving the tiny apartment and the bleeding man behind.

He stepped out into a corridor in the bowels of Star Labs. The breach sucked itself into nothingness. Far away, he could hear alarms hooting. He narrowed his eyes consideringly. He had maybe ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Enough time for the important things.

He walked around the corner and stepped onto the ramp that led up to the pipeline.

Caitlin sat up, her eyes sharp, her mouth moving. He hit the mike, and her voice spilled out. " - at are you doing here at this time?"

He went right up to the glass. "There was never anything keeping you here, was there?" he said. "Not really. You could have transformed and been gone the moment Thawne and Hartley laid hands on you. You could have ridden the winds all the way around the world. You could have tasted air until you found the tiniest  _ whisper _ of your husband and you could have followed it to wherever he was and wreaked bloody havoc until you got him out."

She watched him, still as stone.  


"But you stayed. You let yourself be stuffed into this tin can of a cell. You slept naked on the cold floor and you ate room-temperature meat and you wore weird clothes and you barely got to fly. Why?"

"I told you why."

"You did," he said. "And I was dumb and vain enough to think it was because I was just that hot, when you were telling me loud and clear: You wanted to be with me."

He hit the release button. The door hissed open.

"You'd already found who you were looking for. You just had to find a way to get his dumb ass to remember who he was. And I did."

His wife leapt, or flew, or or just hurled herself at him. He caught her, grunting a little under full-grown woman and full-blown wings, but their lips crashed together hard enough to leave blood in his mouth. 

He laughed for joy.


	8. The First Day

She buried her face in his hair, sobbing. He pressed his nose into her neck, smelling her familiar windswept smell, whispering, "Shhh, I'm here, I'm here, you found me, akoítē, you found me, we're together again."

She pulled away, wiping her eyes. "I'm so angry with you."

He smiled tenderly at her. "Yeah, I can tell."

She scowled back at him. "Your stupid spell stopped my mouth. I couldn't even say your own name to you that first night."

"I know, I know," he murmured, hugging her again. "But closing that breach sapped nearly all my strength, and I couldn't risk the mortals ever getting wind that they had a god on their hands. Who knows how they would have tried to use me?"

"So instead you played their lackey for three years."

"But," he said, ticking up one finger. "They didn't figure it out, now did they?"

She crossed her arms. "When I tasted your air, you reeked of your own magic. You were cloaked in it. You put most of yourself behind a wall, didn't you?" She scowled at him. "And knowing you, one that could only be broken through _by_ you, when you thought through the logical inconsistencies in your situation."

He gazed at her adoringly. She was the only being, mortal or immortal, who could have put that together from the scanty information she'd gotten. Besides himself, obviously. "I'm so crazy about you, babe."

She snorted. "Out-clevered yourself, didn't you?"

"Look, my love, I was barely conscious at the time and I'd just been firebombed by the damn mortal army. I didn't have the luxury of crafting it quite as finely as I would have under other circumstances. If I'd known, I totally would have made some kind of exception for you."

She leaned her forehead against his. "It hurt," she said. "It hurt so much to see you look at me with fear in your eyes."

He hugged her close, glorying in the familiar shape of her body against his. "Not for long."

Her lip wobbled. "Some days I doubted it was even you. I thought perhaps I was fooling myself, even though you spoke the harpy tongue. That I'd found a mortal man who just looked like you, and I wanted so badly to believe I'd found you that I kept seeing you in him." She sniffled. "When you told me that you had feelings for me, I wondered if you'd gotten yourself back - but then you pushed me away. Told me I didn't have to feel the same way. Your wife, and I didn't have to love you."

"I fell for you from the first moment I saw you," he said.

"You fell on your ass," she said tartly.

"Nooo, not that first moment. On the Strophades islands. Remember that? With the guys who were hassling you over King Phineus?"

"How could I forget? You came swooping in and told them we wouldn't bother him anymore." She huffed, still annoyed after thousands of years. "He blinded his children and blamed his wife. Ocy and I were doing our jobs."

"And you bared your teeth at me and snarled," he said tenderly. "I was a goner then, and I'm a goner now. The last three years have been the emptiest of my existence."

"You would have worked it out eventually," she said. "You did."

He stroked her hair out of her face. "I might have broken through the wall, but you gave me the hammer. You kept talking about home, and mentioning my mother - " He couldn't believe he hadn't remembered his own mother's name.

Wow, that had really been a thick wall he'd put up. He thought it probably wasn't the moment to preen over it, though. She was still wobbling between teary and annoyed, and that was the perfect recipe to get a harpy bite right now.

"By the way, what you said about me, to me? That was really sweet."

She scrunched up her nose. "I should have mentioned that you always leave your sandals right in front of the door for me to trip over."

He kissed that scrunchy nose. Zeus, had he missed her. He hadn't known it was her he was missing, but he had, an ache in his stomach like something vital, gone. "I'm so sorry, mi amor."

She hugged him tight. Her wings, big and warm and very very soft, folded around his back in a familiar embrace. He soaked in the feeling of holding her again for another minute before he said reluctantly, "We've got things to do before we get going back home."

She sighed against his cheek. "I know." She folded her wings and moved back just far enough to look at him. "What's your plan?"

"Righteous wrath, wholesale destruction, teaching those mortals a lesson - oh, and getting all our creatures out of this stupid world. After that, reunion sex."

She nodded approvingly. “What's my part in the first four steps?"

"Much as I hate the idea of parting from you again for even one second - how fast can you get yourself to the army base?"

Her eyes lit. "Like the wind."

"Amazing," he said. "That joke is just as dumb as it was three years ago."

She snickered. "You want me to see if there are any creatures left alive that the army didn't tell Thawne about?"

"Got it in one. And hey, if you run into the mortal general who ordered the firebombings - "

She grinned widely, the fluorescent lights glinting off the points of her wicked teeth. "I might just have a little fun."

He gave her a quick smooch to the lips. "Knock yourself out."

She kissed him back and dissolved into wind. The clothes he'd made for her collapsed empty to the ground.

Left alone in the pipeline, Cisco studied the cell for a minute or two. He shook his head in disgust. Fucking Hartley. Fucking _Thawne_ \- "think up some things and get back to me."

He flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders, and threw a boom at the control panels. In the confined space, it punched a hole three feet wide in the wall. He smirked at the sparking wires and the smoking pipes, then hurled another boom at the cell where his wife had been held captive for the past week. Glass shattered, metal screamed as it twisted.

With an almighty groan, it fell off the track and plunged into the pipeline. He leaned over and watched it smolder in a twisted heap at the bottom far below.

Whistling, he strolled up to the cortex.

Somewhat to his surprise, it was empty. No Thawne, no Hartley. He tapped his lower lip for a moment, then turned toward one of the computers. Interesting things, computers. He was pretty sure they'd create mayhem in his world, but life needed a little mayhem every now and then. Kept things from getting stagnant.

The database was open. He pulled up file U-42 and then going on instinct, typed in a single name to the password field.

_Francisco._

The file opened.

The most recent entries were at the top of the screen, tagged with Hartley's initials. _U-42 continues its close interactions with H-1. They screech at each other for hours, and today, they initiated mild sexual contact. Apparently bestiality isn't taboo in their world. Aside from his apparent understanding of primitive screeches, U-42 has still not demonstrated any special abilities to H-1 or in general. Cross-reference file H-1._

He scrolled backwards, a very long way, to the first entry, the one from when they'd first found him. From the initials, it had been Thawne entering this data.

 _Recovered from the breach site: Humanoid male. Remnants of cloth - primitive clothing? Possible abilities - flying and some sort of sonic boom ability. Requires corroboration from video. No creature matches within mythology. Extensive burns and broken bones. Not expected to survive. Stored in the pipeline_.

The next day: _this creature is healing at an extraordinary rate. Survival now very possible. Creature opened its eyes but didn't focus, and passed out again within five minutes. Moved into the med lab. If its healing ability can be isolated, this could change the course of medicine._

Later in the day: _when U-42 was moved into the med lab, it seemed to have a calming effect on the other creatures caged there. Interesting._

The next day: _Near the evening it awoke and spoke to me, in English. Where and how it learned to speak is unknown, as it claimed to have lost its memory. I have designed a method of studying this creature in a natural habitat. I hope to ensure its compliance and see what it can do when it thinks nobody is watching._

Well.

He'd known what they thought of him. He'd known when he'd realized what they were actually doing. But nothing like seeing it written out.

With a chirpy little ding, the elevator opened. He twirled the chair around to see Hartley and Thawne in the elevator, the former holding a gigantic tranq gun and the latter with a very swollen nose - possibly broken - and two black eyes.

"Took you long enough," Cisco said pleasantly. He glanced at Hartley. "Waiting for reinforcements to get here?"

Hartley fired the tranq gun.

Cisco simply tossed out a hand and the dart slammed to a stop in mid-air, held there by a shimmering bubble. He shook his head. "You're kidding me, right?"

He rose to his feet and twisted his hand. The dart crumpled like it was made of paper. He opened his hand, and it fell to the floor with a tinny, cheap-sounding clang.

Their eyes followed it, wide and uncomprehending.

Cisco snapped his fingers. "Hey, boys, my eyes are up here."

When he had their attention again, he whipped around and hurled a boom. The wall between the cortex and the med lab shattered, bits of glass showering to the floor

"Gonna put this in your notes?" he said, and threw another boom at the computer. It exploded in a shower of sparks and melting plastic. "U-42 has been behaving erratically. U-42 has been insisting on treating H-1 like she has feelings. U-42 is asking about the passworded file. U-42 seems to have realized that he was never an employee of Star Labs, but its prize lab rat."

He whirled and threw one last boom just above their heads. They both dove out of the way as a particularly huge pipe came crashing down.

"U-42 is _piiiiiiiiiiiiiissed."_

"Cisco," Thawne said. "Calm down. We don't mean you any harm. Be rational."

"What did you think you'd caught?" Cisco asked, dropping back into the chair and propping his feet on the smoldering wreck of the workstation. "A satyr? A centaur? Whatever it was, you must have been so disappointed when it was just a little brown dude with nothing clearly special about him. No wings, no hooves, no horse's ass.

"But you knew you caught something. Because it's not as if anything unremarkable could have come out of that breach. So go ahead, boys. Ask the question that’s rattling around your brain right now.”

They stared at him.

"Go on," he said. "Three little words."

Thawne croaked. “What are you?”

Cisco spun his chair lazily. “What am I? Rude. How about who am I? Because I’m somebody, you know.”

“Fine,” Thawne bit out. “Who are you?”

"Me? I have many names. Call me the son of Maia. The keeper of the flocks."

"What the hell are you babbling about?” Hartley snarled.

Cisco got to his feet. "The guide and the messenger. The trickster, the conniver, he of the many-turning wiles."

With every name that had been used to identify him for eons, his smile grew. He felt them snapping into place, one by one.

"The comrade of the feast, the giver of delight, the luck-bringer. The watchful, the keen-sighted. He who walks between worlds, the last companion of the dead. The god of the gateway and of the crossroads. I am Hermes, son of Zeus."

He punched upward and every skylight in the place exploded, glass showering down in ragged shards. With shrieks of fear, both mortals dropped to the ground, covering their heads with their arms.

Cisco looked down at them, his mouth twisting. “And y'all are _fucked_.”

Panting, Hartley lifted his head to glare at Cisco. Little bits of glass tinkled out of his hair, like the ceramic shards from the coffee mug a few nights before. "You expect us to believe you're a god? You.”

Cisco shrugged. "Believe whatever you want, it won't change anything that I do." He glanced up, noticed a panel of glass that had escaped the carnage, and idly tossed a boom. The glass dissolved into knife-edged powder.

A breeze whispered through the shattered skylights. It slipped cool fingers through his hair and stroked his skin. He grinned. "But hey, you know what, boys? I could've forgiven the whole treating-me-like-a-lab-rat thing for three years. The lies and the surveillance and the never-ending night shifts and keeping me dependent on you so I'd never realize what total dicks you were. That could've been water under the bridge, maybe. But you know where you really fucked up here? Point of no return? It's when you put _my wife_ in a tin can."

Caitlin materialized between them. In the sunlight, her wings shone like glaciers, and her talons glinted wickedly.

"Hey, babe," Cisco said, leaning over to give her a kiss. "We were just talking about you. How was the base?"

She smiled grimly. "No living creatures. And now no mortals either." She ostentatiously lifted one long talon and picked at her bloodied teeth. "Sorry," she said, spitting  something out. "Got a little general in my teeth there."

"It talks?" Thawne said.

She tossed him a withering look. "It always talked. It just never wanted to say anything to you."

Cisco grinned broadly. Like him, Caitlin absorbed languages, but her decision to speak to him only in harpy tongue had kept Hartley, and by extension Thawne, far further in the dark than if she’d spoken English. His amazing wife.

He turned back to the mortals. “You know something interesting about my wife and her sisters? I mean, there's a lot of interesting things, but did you know they guard the underworld? And they’re responsible for escorting evildoers to the afterlife.”

Caitlin gave them a little wave.

"You boys have done some evil here,” he said. “Haven’t you?”

Hartley's eyes slid toward Thawne. The director remained impassive, staring up at him.

“Now, I have no doubt Caitlin is ready and willing to escort you to this world’s underworld. In fact, I do believe it would be her genuine pleasure.”

She leaned down and ran her talon very lightly up Thawne’s arm. A visible shudder racked him. He ducked his head a moment, then lifted it again. "Cisco - you have to know - I've always considered you like a son."

Caitlin hissed and lifted her hand, but Cisco held up his hand before she could rip out Thawne’s throat.

"Like a _son?”_ he said.

“Yes,” Thawne said. “Of course.”

“You found a lost, confused young man and immediately set about convincing him that he owed you everything, and the only way to pay you back was to turn over his entire life to you. My family's daddy issues go back to the dawn of creation, and I still think that what you just said is hella messed up. If you’re pleading for your life, mortal, you’re going to have to find another tack."

Hartley lifted his head. "That was all Thawne,” he said. "I worked endless night shifts too. I was his lackey too. Don't blame me for what he did."

"Idiot," Cisco, and Hartley flinched. "Moron. Fool. Recognize those? Just a few of the things you've called me over the past few years. Never once a kind word. You know, nobody ever talks like that to someone they consider an equal. Or even a human being. So tell me. Why should I have any compassion for you, when you never had any for me?"

Hartley folded down into the floor again.

Cisco shook his head at them both. This wasn’t quite as fun as he’d been expecting. Time to end it.

"You know, I've had bouts of the hiccups that lasted longer than your whole pathetic life spans," he said. "And in the end, that's what this whole thing has been. A hiccup. Annoying. Inconvenient. And when it's over - forgotten."

“So,” Caitlin said. “How will we end it, my love?”

He shrugged. “I mean, you could disembowel them. Or I could squash them like bugs. But that takes so much effort, and I really just want to go home."

The mortals lifted their heads warily, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, wondering if maybe it was a train.

He looked around. "I _am_ going to turn this place into a smoking hole in the ground," he said conversationally. "Just to clear up any confusion. But I've always had a soft spot for humanity, so I'm going to let the two of you get out of here before that happens."

On their knees before him, they gaped.

He leaned in. "Why don't you get going, before I start to rethink that stance, huh?"

Hartley was up first, bolting for the elevator doors. Thawne was right on his heels. Cisco thought, _What the hell_ and threw one last boom, blowing the elevator to smithereens. They reeled back, and spun to face him, grey-faced.

He grinned at them. “You’ll have to take the stairs.”

Caitlin wrinkled her nose at him as the mortals scuttled away toward the fire stairs. “So petty.”

“And yet so satisfying,” he said. “Grab that box over there by you, wouldja? Some of the dryads aren’t doing so hot. They’re going to need help getting back home with us.”

She leaned over and caught the box, and followed him to the door that led out to the courtyard. She had to duck so her wings wouldn’t brush the door jamb. “Oh,” she said mildly, studying the trees. “Except for the fencing, this isn’t half-bad.”

“They were in cages when I first came,” he said grimly. “Inside. You mind doing the honors?”

With the razor-sharp inside edges of her talons, she swiped at the chicken-wire fencing, leaving long gashes behind. With a frown of concentration, she peeled the wire back like a sardine can.

Cisco blew her a kiss and strolled through the wide gap. Tiny black eyes blinked at him.

“Hey guys,” he said softly. “Guess what? We’re going home.”

They swarmed out of the trees, some of them slower and weaker than others, but all of them bright-eyed with joy. Caitlin helped him put the slowest ones into the box. “Is this all of them?”

He counted. Nineteen. Out of over a hundred dryads to start with. He felt grief press on him, and bit it back.

“I think there are a few more,” she said, pointing.

He looked to where she indicated, and knelt. “What’s this?”

A tiny tree sprouted between the roots of a larger one. A sapling. And there, under the delicate leaves, a dryad the size of a bumblebee peered up at him.

“For real? How many of you are there?” He looked around, his newly unshackled senses picking out three - no - four more tiny saplings, and their dryads. He huffed out a laugh. “Really?”

Caitlin laughed too. “They’ve had three years.”

“Life finds a way,” he said. “Even in exile.”

“We can transplant your trees,” Caitlin said to the dryads. “Take them back home with us. Plant them in the soil where your ancestors all thrived.”

The new dryads fluttered and buzzed softly, staying put.

Cisco sighed. "But you don't want that, do you? Even if your parents came from our world, you're rooted here."

"Really?" Caitlin said. "You want to stay - " She looked around at the glass and steel that surrounded them. "Here?"

Cisco brushed his fingers over the spindly trunks. "Yeah, it looks like you do," he said. He straightened up, brushing dirt off his knees. "Okay. Your trees, your call. I guess I'll have to drop in to check up on you every now and then.”

The tiny dryads buzzed happily, then slipped back into their trees and disappeared.

“I guess this this place could use some nature that can fight back,” Caitlin said.

He grinned back. “Okay then. Let’s go.”

The courtyard was terrible for one of Caitlin's corporeal takeoffs, so she handed him the box of the weaker dryads and dissolved into wind. He simply rose into the air, higher and higher until he hovered five hundred feet above the city, a rematerialized Caitlin swooping around him and dryads buzzing close around his shoulders.

From above, Thawne Labs looked like a plaything. Two tiny figures raced out of the building and toward the two cars in the parking lot. They screeched away, fishtailing the turn onto the street.

Cisco tossed a spell at the fence around the property. They wouldn't be back, and the dryads would have all the freedom and space they needed to establish their little colony.

He narrowed his eyes and built a temporary protective bubble around the courtyard, and the saplings there. Then he hurled boom after boom into the building itself, shattering windows, collapsing walls, twisting support beams. Smoke began to rise as a fire burned within. He figured that would take care of it.

Caitlin swooped by him. "Feel better?"

He blew her a kiss. "Better than I have in ages. Let’s go.”

"All you, sweetheart."

He spread his hands and focused, thinking of home, of the sunlight on the water, of the heat and the rocky hillsides. Then he peeled reality apart, and they dove through.

The breach zipped shut behind him.

He breathed in deep. The hot sun beat down on the top of his head, and the blue, blue water shone far below. Home.

“Good to be back?” she said.

“So good,” he murmured, and then let out a sigh. "I've still got one thing left to do before we can go home.”

All the mysterious moles on his body were lifting up off his skin, dissolving, spreading apart until they hung in the air around him - unicorns, chimeras, griffins, manticores, pegasi -

And the dryads. So many dryads.

Caitlin gasped. “Are those - ?”

“The shades of the creatures who died over there,” he said. They’d lost their lives far away from home and the rest they deserved. Some of them, he'd never seen with the eyes of Cisco Ramon. The ones that the army had killed had made their way to him. "I said it felt like they came to Star Labs to die," he said thoughtfully. "They did."

"They attached themselves to you," she said, staring around them. Her wings swept through the shade of a pegasus, which swirled and reformed itself.

"Until I could bring them home and escort them to the afterlife." It was one of his duties as a god, and he had a feeling that things had been a little wild around here without him to take care of it. He was going to be busy for awhile here.

That was fine. It sure beat sitting on his ass watching Star Wars again. Not that it wasn’t an excellent yarn. When he went back to check on the colony of dryads, he was going to figure out a way to show it to Caitlin.

He turned to her. Even through the cloud of shades that hung around him, he could see the sun shining on her wings and in her hair, and his heart lurched exactly the way it had that first time in the pipeline, on the Strophades islands, every time in between. “Coming with me to the underworld?”

“Anywhere,” she said, smiling at him. "As long as we go home from there."

FINIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get ready for a long-ass author's note, you guys, because I've got a lot of things to say.
> 
> First of all: Sure, Barry could have been the god they called Fleet Footed. After all, one of the prior incarnations of the Flash was even called Max Mercury. But Hermes was more than fast. He was also a trickster, a thinker, endlessly inventive. Like fellow tricksters Loki and Coyote, he stirred things up on Olympus, kept things exciting, and never hesitated to deflate somebody's vanity, even Zeus’s. As the messenger god, he was the connection between humans and gods, and between life and the afterlife. To me, that sounded an awful lot like our dimension-hopping Cisco.
> 
> In Greek tradition, there were (usually) three harpies, Aello, Celaeno, and Ocypete. Iris was their sister, the goddess of the rainbow and another messenger to the gods. You have no idea how gleeful I was over that just sitting there ready for me. Her husband, Zephyrus, was the god of the West Wind. Who knows; maybe he went by Barry on occasion. Eternity is a long time. You collect nicknames.
> 
> In the oldest stories, harpies were "lovely-locked maidens," the personifications of storm winds. Powerful, but not monstrous or evil. Over the centuries, misogyny impacted their portrayal in myth and poetry until they became the ugly, fearsome, filthy half-bird half-women who “befouled everything they touched” as Hartley says.
> 
> In the story of King Phineus, usually it's Iris who intercedes, but a few versions say Hermes instead. That's what I went with for their first meeting.
> 
> I invented most of Caitlin's air-magic, including the ability to transform into air and the ability to learn things from peoples’ breath. There's not a lot about harpies’ specific abilities out there. They’re just a few of the throng of minor gods and immortals that litter Greek myth like D-listers on Twitter. I also invented Cisco/Hermes’ ability to create breaches like our Cisco, mostly because the ancient Greeks didn’t have our concept of a multiverse. If they had, I have a feeling Hermes would have been in charge of those gateways as he supervised so many others.
> 
> Like most gods, Hermes had an exciting love life. He had number of lovers (including some men) and at least one wife. As far as I know, he was never married to a harpy. But then again, I never heard that he wasn't, either.
> 
> Shout-out to korok who picked up a lot of the mythological breadcrumbs I was laying out and figured out almost the whole plot by the third chapter. Wow!
> 
> And of course, I couldn't have written this without my dearest Hedgi, who was always available to help me think things through, find connections to fill in giant plot holes, and didn’t hesitate to tell me when something wasn’t going to work. This is a far better story with your help than it would have been without it.


End file.
